Pure joy is terrifying. Especially when its ambling towards you at speed covered in paint. I step backwards out of the path of the party creature rolling towards me and step straight into the path of a hula hoop scything across the dance floor. There must be at least 50 of them in constant motion through the venue. To my left, two girls have trapped a younger guy in two such hoops, pulling in opposite directions as he pretends to struggle. The smile he’s wearing is set so wide and deep in his face that it might be permanent.

A damp, sleazy heat is humming along the length of the Yarra as the rain finally breaks. A huge ball of it is caught under the Residence, Melbourne Music Week’s geodesic festival hub, a curtain of water pouring down its sides. I toe my way clear of the dome carefully. The dance floor’s been paralysed by huge wads of coloured yarn that have been tangled around half the bodies in the venue. There’s an older woman directly in front of me standing stricken in wooden jewellery and sensible shoes, two younger party animals cavorting around her, wrapping her in coloured string like a some kind of voluntary (and tediously ritualistic) embalming.   

Outside the domed stage area I can see someone mashing coloured chalk into a concrete block with both hands, teeth gritted beneath rainbow face paint. There’s people swaying atop the shoulders of others, faces simultaneously contorted in every instant extremity of happiness and sorrow. In a way its way less like an afternoon party and way more like the second day of a festival where reeling clumps of human are not completely aware of how to operate themselves  in the slow, creeping mud.

Although these particular humans are a little different. Actually, they’re just plain little. I’d say about half the crowd is aged between 2 and 5 years old. Sure, Two Bright Lakes gigs are fairly renowned for their fresh, young crowds – who for the most part look evenly dispersed on either side of the legal voting age - but the 27 prams I can count beached against the stage barrier and sharking their way slowly through the crowd make it clear that the core demographic here is too low,  even for Two Bright Lakes. The music echoes into the captured heat of the dome, fairly incidentally, as parents and children empty their energy reserves over one another 

Like last time I saw Banoffee and Oscar Key Sung sharing a stage it was underground at night, rather than open air in the afternoon,  where everyone was caught on every gesture, bending their bodies to every beat. The atmosphere at the Residence on this particular Saturday afternoon is generating a very different sort of captivation.

 

Undoubtedly the most captivating part of the afternoon is watching the presence of what so many grown-up parties so palpably lack: True Reckless Abandon. Kids are swinging hoops wildly at arm’s length, smashing skulls with strangers and experiencing a purity of emotion that adults only have access to with a similar purity of drug. But what’s more interesting is the ripple effect that the True Reckless Abandon creates. At any normal show its friends and acolytes that bask in the reflected glory of the band. Here, its parents. There’s something indisputable about Dad’s dancing with their kids, Mums running after their hoop-throwing, paint spattered children that kind of makes people there to see the bands in the presence of such True Reckless Abandon - people like me- not cool at all. I never thought Dad dancing would have its day in the proverbial sun. The small huddle of Two Bright Lakes kids in front of stage right don’t even cut it. Carefully nonchalant and stabbing the ground with their trademark ‘The-Floor-Is-So-Damn-Hot-Right-Here’ dance moves, they seem, even when joined by Martha Brown (Banoffee) after her set, crippled by restraint. I shudder to think what I must look like. The roving photographer seems particularly aware of being in dispute with his immediate environment, and clutches his camera and tripod like its driftwood on a rough sea.    

But all this being said, there is something a little special about the show. Mainly because these are two acts who do matter, who aren’t incidental. To see them performing to a handful of truly watchful people is kind of entrancing. Banoffee, crumpled over her keyboard in a massively oversized shirt and face paint, definitely looks the part for the kids show. But her music instantly betrays her. Some of her songs are so close to beautiful, and her sentiment so earnest, that its impossible to see a way that she won’t become something big in the not-too-distant future. Full of languor, she writes starkly, and with a little more time, will almost certainly be writing brilliantly. Likewise, Oscar Key Sung soars parallel to the crowd at hand, but to the people who see him, there’s an air of the unforgettable. The falsetto that tumbles so effortlessly out of him, the arching, rolling harmonies and staggered beats. Truly, there’s no one else in Australia doing much close to what Oscar is doing right now. And his live show is in constant flux. Now he’s playing with a Juno, is building layers of his songs live, and is even playing fundamental parts of his tracks (parts as fundamental as kicks and snares) by hand. He’s already come a long way since a backing tape and a backup dancer. He’s finding the science in his sound.

Towards the end of Oscar’s set a kid about 6 years old starts a jarring dance, front and centre on the dancefloor, his limbs shaking wildly from below his blue t-shirt and backwards Chicago Bulls cap. At first I think it might be a show for a Mum and Dad in distant orbit somewhere, but it’s not. Much to Oscar’s muted amusement, the kid continues his convulsive dance until the final beat before collapsing wearily against the barrier. Throughout the entirety of Melbourne Music Week, I don’t think I saw the security guys smile so damn much.