One word: relentless. From gates opening, Dillon Francis is bringing the noise before Kill the Noise...well, kills it. This is not a day for messing about - these guys don't do peaks and troughs - it's pretty much peaks and peaks from the outset. It's all building to an almighty racket, courtesy of a movement's conductor, the long haired king of dubstep.



If you can call it dubstep, of course. More realistically, what Skrillex (and everyone on this evening's bill for that matter) does is take the loudest, most dramatic and ludicrously bassy elements of every genre of electronic music and...well, it sounds like it's all being played at once. What you get is a neon mess of growls and FX, broken up by mere moments of reggae and dub, brief gasps of air before you're dragged back in. And it's brilliant.



Take Knife Party. Two guys from Pendulum, by their own admission doing 'exactly what they want'. You can tell - each song gets about 90 seconds before colliding with the next. To be fair, they have a remarkably impressive back catalogue for having existed barely a year - the warped reggae of 'Bonfire', the frazzled modem that is 'Internet Friends', their remix of Swedish House Mafia's 'Save the World' (and 'Antidote', their collaboration with same) all get a quick blast. Then there's growling monster 'Centipede' and the slightly intimidating 'Sleaze'. All at least hinted at, if barely played, punctuated by the encouragement of Dundrum MC (and we're not making that up) Gareth McGrillen - as if we needed it.



But they're here for Skrillex, of course. Several thousand of them - a mixture of the very young, the old enough to know better, some punk kids, rave monkeys and the curious. And how could you not be curious? A local hack has just described Skrillex as 'this generation's Nirvana'. It's not a ridiculous statement, either. Forgetting about the music for a bit (as quite a few floating voters are happy to do), this is quite the show. He's inside an actual spaceship, for a start. Conducting flame throwers, smoke canons, two cinema screens and a seemingly random array of lights. When it starts to rain, it's suggested Skrillex is responsible, syncing the weather with his music. Nothing would surprise us.



As for the music - well, we're running out of adjectives at this point. A countdown, 'Right In' and 'Ruffneck' set the tone nicely, with the likes of 'Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites' and 'My Name is Skrillex' illustrating quite well how most of this guys music starts off nice before turning rather nasty. He'll rework Flux Pavillion, Avicii and Nero along the way, throwing in the occasional greeting and only once putting a foot wrong - his VJ's decision to incorporate a tricolour into those visuals was a little naïve.



Still though, what a night. Colourful, random, distressing and insane all at once. Belsonic - out of the blocks like Usain Bolt.

Rigsy

Photo by Carrie Davenport