If you’ve been reading the Quietus these last few weeks (or following us on Twitter), you might well have noticed our buzz of anticipation in advance of last weekend’s uber-rave Plex/Colony/BleeD, featuring all manner of excellent, soundsystem-rattling dance music. It was, expectedly, a roundly enjoyable night and filled with too many highlights across its twelve-hour length to list here.
In the wake of last week’s rave, Colony – who have put on many of the Quietus’ favourite nights in the capital over their five years of operation – have announced that their next party, which takes place on Saturday 7th December at the Hive Project, Hackney Wick, will be their last. It looks set to be a great one and we’d thoroughly recommend attending if you’re in the London area. Proceedings are headed up by Bristol’s mighty Peverelist, one-third of killer UK soundsystem techno collective Livity Sound and one of the most inspirational dance musicians in the UK at the moment, and he’s joined by a line-up of Colony friends and favourites: Equinox, Sync 24 and SPACES. Advance tickets are currently £5 (to rise to £10 closer to the time), and you can snag them from here.
In the email announcing their intention to end, they account their decision in part to the changing nature of the electronic and dance music world in the last half-decade: "Without wanting to go on at great length, it’s just not tenable, for us, to be true to the kind of DIY, anti-brand, anti-bullshit UK soundsystem aesthetic we’ve always valued and to continue to push new music and new ideas, rather than simply fall back on tried-and-tested methods. At least, not in any consistent, enjoyable sense – which is very sad." But more positively, they add, "of equal, if not more, significance, is the simple fact that we genuinely feel we’ve said what we needed to say, booked (most of) the people we wanted to book, and built exactly the kind of event we always aimed to – both in terms of the smaller, more esoteric nights we’ve put on and the 500+ balls-out, beans-in cane ups we’ve managed to execute over recent times. Quite simply, the project is complete."
The closing of Colony’s doors is a saddening proposition in many ways; as well as putting on some belting evenings in proper community-driven style, Colony head honchos MB and CB have become good friends of the Quietus in the last couple of years, to the extent that we collaborated to host an excellent Colony vs Quietus night of mind-bending dance music in September, with Mark Fell/Sensate Focus, Beneath, Dom Butler and TVO. Over the years their parties have been put on with a pleasingly broad-minded and music first attitude: giving equal weight to up-and-coming new artists (including relatively early-doors bookings for now, err, ‘household’ names like the Hessle Audio crew and Perc) as veterans and unsung underground heroes, and cutting broadly across styles while remaining rooted in a strongly ravey, UK-centric, bass-driven aesthetic. There’s been no other promoters quite like them in the capital over that time, and one suspects there’ll be a distinctly Colony-shaped hole in the London scene come next year.
