Death of Some Freak pt. 5: B O D E G A
Oh, what can I really say about this time of my life… Bodega is perhaps the adventure that I have been involved with that I am most proud of in my whole life. We built it on love, total love. Real hippy shit!
A bunch of us came together to do a system at a massive squat party. We decided that instead of just going balls out and playing, well, squat party music, we would go for a different vibe, present a nice space and sell sangria and play weird shit and stuff. An early recce of the site happened with reps of all the crews and we discovered we were allocated a basement room. When deciding what to call ourselves we decided Basement Bodega, on account of us servin Sangria.
So it was that we made sangria (gourmet sangria, recipe courtesy of Danks Street Depot), got together a load of incense and mellow lights and plastic flowers and went up to the ABC studios and there were FUCKLOADS OF COPS everywhere. No ABC party, but the drum and bass maniacs had already broken into another warehouse in Marrickville and everyone was en route… word on the street was that there was no room for the Bodega tho… but we set up our sangria stall anyway and took enough cash to cover our costs.
The next day, we overran a local pub in Redfern with all our incense and mellow lights and had a raucous day that became the afterparty for the squat party. It was after this party that I gave up drinking.
The bodega was BORN
bodega @ the ABC party – bonus MCK
A successful return to the ABC studios a month or two later cemented our position as crazy fuckers with sangria, beautiful-feeling spaces and strange music. We did a few more squat parties and then started getting invited to more legit warehouse spaces, where we would take over the whole space and do our thing there. Some epic parties took place, that practically no pictures exist of!
Bodega @ The Chocolate Factory (RIP)
We would spend DAYS beforehand dressing the spaces, making them as beautiful as possible. We named the parties strangely – “The Barefoot Peacock Ritual“, “The Mysterious Passtimes of Mohini-Murti“. We served magic mushroom tea at these parties and got everyone slightly sideways, in order that we might bombard them with psychedelic jazz, brutal jungle, birdsong, free-association scat singing with space echo, and disco favourites.
We made the stellar decision early on to stick the decks ON THE FLOOR with a big double bed behind them, and to have the DJ ‘booth’ loaded up with LOADS of effects units and light controllers and smoke machines and stuff so that everyone could get involved in the tweaking if they wanted. We were able to manipulate the whole environment. We could make all the lights in the room (and we had standard lamps and spot lights and rope lights and desk lights) pulse in time to the music…
And the place always smelled amazing, and everybody was awe-struck, wide-eyed like kids, the strangeness of everything, the amount of love, the mushrooms – we made a little crazy world for them!
And the sheer amount of creativity that went into things! It was such a potent idea and it inspired a LOT of people to do lots of great things, safe in the knowledge that there were going to be these crazy parties that were like nothing else.
Because it wasn’t about the dancefloor, really. Even though nearly all the music was danceable, and there were usually people dancing to the music at any point in time, most people were just hanging out, checking out the incredible visuals – for one party, called the Digital Hysteria Remedy, Chris made a giant vagina out of fabric and foam, with a mirrorball for a clit. It was as big as a human!
And in the mornings, we bribed the stayers with nitrous bulbs to help us tidy up, and the party never finished until long after I’d gone home to bed.
It was sheer heaven to be involved with such a wonderful bunch of creative people in such a sustained, successful, innovative endeavour that brought absolute joy to so many people. It was simply the best time of my life.
Here’s a tune we made in 2008… it sums up for me the joy of bodega!
