When Flight Facilities bounced into our office on a Friday afternoon, they were buzzing with nervous energy. Nonchalant jokes and jovial banter glazed over the fact that the next day heralded the biggest show in their seven-year careers, and they’d be tackling the momentous occasion in their hometown with 50 members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
While the two have long been staples in Sydney’s electronica scene with more festival sets, legendary mixes and club all-nighters than we can count, they’d never tackled anything of this magnitude. The Domain – a space in the heart of the CBD usually reserved for festivals – was being cleared out for Flight Facilities to perform their tracks for a gig that acted as the crown jewel of the Red Bull Music Academy Weekender, backed by the notable and eyebrow-raising addition of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Jimmy Lyell was well aware of the mammoth task at hand. “I walked down to the site last night and I remember thinking exactly that. This stage is usually for like 15 bands or something and I was like ‘Holy shit.’ It was one of those times when we were a little bit nervous and a little bit excited,” he said. “It’s like this whole production to put on our show. The funniest thing is walking out of the site and looking at all of the stuff that has no bearing on your show. You think about lights and sound and stage, but then you see forklifts and golf buggies and you’re like, ‘What the hell is this for?’ The trickle down system of stuff – all this because of our bullshit,” partner-in-crime Hugo Gruzman added.
Flight Facilities put on a similar show in Melbourne last year, with 12,500 tickets selling out the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in a matter of hours. The Sydney show upped the ante even further, proposing a 15,000 person capacity. “We were quite hesitant. We were looking at a lot of smaller venues first and hoping to sell one out and then put on another one on sale,” Lyell said.
Still, they managed to shift the colossal amount of tickets a week after the sale date. “Melbourne took three hours to sell out, and when we put this one on sale, it took a week to sell out. We got a false sense of expectation, and the Fuzzy guys were like ‘No, that’s really good!’ Not to rag on my own city, but Melbourne’s more in touch with its music scene,” Gruzman said, additionally pointing to Mike Baird’s lockout laws as a reason for Sydney’s disconnect. Gruzman is also quick to point to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as a reason for the show’s manic selling rate, saying “I very much doubt we could have done that without an orchestra – or even half that.”
The man responsible for making the orchestral elements possible was Davide Rossi, who arranged all the music for the orchestra to play. The two are quick to praise his efforts. “Socially, he’s really aware. Musically, he’s a genius. We call him the one man orchestra. We’ll give him something to play, and he’ll play every instrument and track it so it sounds like an orchestra. He’s made this possible,” Lyell said.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the duo would only practice with the real orchestra for the first time on the day before the main event. As much as it was a challenge to connect musically with strings, horns and all – the rapid turnaround rate between rehearsals and showtime left little time for personal chemistry to flourish. Lyell reflected on his time with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, saying “At the start we were like ‘I don’t know where we stand with these guys, do we talk to them?’ A lot of people said they would be pretty machine-like. Some were pretty serious, they’d come and do their job and go home. We thought they’d all be like that, but then we started to talk to them. Some of them had brothers and sisters and sons and daughters who had some of our music. It was really cool and we got photos with them, and by showtime there was a really good vibe.”
Soon enough, the bridge had been built – and extended well past the gig. “We had an afterparty last year in Melbourne, and a couple of the viola players came down… There was a point at the afterparty where we asked everyone if we wanted to take their shirts off, and every obliged – including the viola players,” Lyell said. Gruzman added that “I got a message from one of them about an hour earlier. It said ‘Yeah I’m going to come to the afterparty, is there somewhere I can store a viola?'”
Aside from the shirtless viola players, the Melbourne show seems to have set a nice precedent for Sydney’s soiree – continuing to foster the relationship between electronica and classical music, especially in a time when the EDM phenomenon has many questioning the musicality of tunes made on a computer. “It reaffirmed their suspicion that people do really want to see orchestras, just in a contemporary way. They just need to know how to approach it. There’s no reason you can’t have a party with a bunch of classically trained musicians,” Gruzman said.
“I think it’s been ingrained in an evolutionary sense. That kind of music has been around for 200 or 300 years, there’s something in there that people still crave, they just need it to be updated in some way,” he continued.
The next night, Flight Facilities took the stage at The Domain, and played top 15,000 people under the stars. They suggest that another orchestra show is very possible in the future, after they’ve written new material – but for now, Sydney has just witnessed something pretty damn special.
