#UpcomingGigs DJ Koze and Róisín Murphy at Sydney Opera House ~ Lurid House Live

A night of golden house and disco at the world-famous concert hall.

DJ Koze and Róisín Murphy at Sydney Opera House For the past month or so, Sydney has been bound by bushfires. The seemingly interminable blazes have incinerated bushland on the metropolitan fringes, the dense smoke and smell of burning refusing to let the rest of the city forget. Some days, ash falls from the sky and entire suburbs disappear under a cloud of impenetrable grey. It was in this feverish maelstrom of climate catastrophe that Stefan Kozalla, better known as DJ Koze, made his debut at the Opera House.

As I dodged through the crowd inching its way into the House's famed concert hall, it was impossible not to crack a grin at the heated discussions I overhead dissecting Kozalla's extensive catalogue. One conversation, though, was stuck on the correct pronunciation of his alias. "Are you sure it's 'cosy'? I thought it was 'cot-sir,' a man in a denim jacket mused to his companion.

Whatever the phonetics, Kozalla is unmistakably talented. Within minutes he had the crowd up on their feet, dancing and cheering, no small feat for a venue plagued by long-standing associations with stuffy conservatism. It was a foreign sight for me: the Opera House, usually home to resident orchestras not resident DJs, transformed into a field of magnetic energy.

All around me, a lively scene played out. Bodies writhed, jumped and shook in the aisles. Kozalla, wearing a headdress and discount sunglasses, cut loose shapes behind a rig camouflaged by plastic vines and palm trees. The front of the stage was draped in black mesh. It felt like we were watching Kozalla make effortless transitions—Gabriele Poso's remix of "Afro Sambroso" by Lokkhi Terra and Dele Sosimi into Kanye West's "Use This Gospel"—through a giant mosquito net, or a rip in the space-time continuum.

The night's surprise guest, the Irish singer-songwriter Róisín Murphy, took full advantage of the unusual stage design. She can-caned and cavorted with the black mesh curtain while singing "Illumination" from Kozalla's latest album, Knock Knock, eventually making it through to the other side with a tip of her cowboy hat. Then, after Kozalla had steered the audience through many a cult favourite, including the new Four Tet track under his unpronounceable alias, Murphy returned for the most anticipated moment of the evening.

Sensing the anticipation, Kozalla treated the crowd to the extended disco version of "Pick Up." Murphy delivered a spirited performance to match, dancing with such obvious delight that it was hard to imagine the words she was singing had, in fact, once painted a morbid picture of doomed romance in Gladys Knight & The Pips' original. But it's these contradictions that make Kozalla's music so inimitable, and this show was no different. A night of house at the House offered a much-needed breath of fresh air in increasingly suffocating times.

Photo credit /
Jordan Munns

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