2ManyDJs: Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool

2ManyDJs

2ManyDJs brought the perfect party to Liverpool’s Invisible Wind Factory and Getintothis’ Banjo reports back from the dancefloor.

2ManyDJs have made a career out of mixing the ummixable and tonight was a masterclass in the art of DJing, providing the sounds and beats to keep a sold out Invisible Wind Factory bouncing into the small hours.

Arriving early, the IWF looked amazing, although they do seem to have appropriated the Christmas lights from Bold Street. Lights and swathes of cloth are draped from the ceiling and the stage is illuminated with vertical strips of light that are constantly changing colour and forming shapes.

The crowd arrive slowly and are treated to a support DJ who, if we may slip into cliché for a moment, takes the crowd on a journey. Unfortunately, we never found out his name, but he played something of a blinder tonight. Starting with slow electro and slowly building over his three hour set, he had the crowd moving as soon as they put their feet on the dancefloor.

Around 1.30, 2ManyDJs arrived on stage with no fanfare or introduction and, instantly, everything seemed to move up a level.

The lights, up until this point, looking good but not doing anything outrageous, go suddenly full force. Lasers fire, the stage’s backdrop lights break into fragments, flash and strobe. 2ManyDJs are undoubtedly tonight’s draw act and they rise to the challenge on all levels.

What they do is extremely clever, taking a hook from one song, say Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic and force it into an arranged marriage with a groove from another completely unrelated song, such as something from Earth Wind and Fire.

Thankfully they manage to maintain this cleverness without ever taking their eye of the main goal, to play to the dancefloor. The beats and the groove never drop or suffer as a result of their magpie approach to DJing.

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On paper none of this should work, but it somehow does and it comes together to form something that is greater than the sum of its parts. There is great fun to be had in identifying the parts that make up their sets, as a snatch of a familiar song floats into view only to be overridden by something else just as we realise what we are hearing.

Steaming right into @2ManyDJs tonight. Hope I can maintain until they come on.

— J2O (@Jon_Owen5) February 1, 2019

The likes of Michael Jackson, Chic and Daft Punk are all raw materials to 2ManyDJs, they are there to be stripped down, built up and generally fucked with in their ever-changing sound collage. They have been doing this since the turn of the millennium and while what they do may have lost its novelty value, it has never sounded formulaic or old hat.

There is still an undeniable thrill to be had in hearing 2ManyDJs plunder and reconstruct any song that falls into their orbit, the unpredictability of what they do keeps the audience on their toes in more ways than one.

2ManyDJs are the perfect party band and tonight we had a perfect party.

Images by Getintothis’ Mark Holt