Catching your reflection in the mirrors that greet you at the steps of Academy, you can’t help but consider the choices made leading up to this point. Thankfully I’m feeling pretty good about myself, its 11pm and I know exactly what I’ve got myself into: DJ Yoda.
DJ Yoda and I have a bit of a history. He’s helped me celebrate a birthday at the 24 hour merry-go-round that is Revolver on Melbourne’s Chapel St, and more recently, New Year’s at Falls Festival. Needless to say, I don’t need much encouragement to see Yoda.
The sound of horns and strings starts echoing around the club and all eyes turn to the stage. Duncan Beiny, otherwise known as DJ Yoda, emerges with a mischievous grin, clearly enjoying seeing his audience’s bemused reaction to the Star Wars theme.
Aside from having helped herald the ubiquitous now ‘mash up’ sound along with the likes of DJ Z-Trip and 2manyDJs, Yoda has also made a name for himself by injecting humour and pop culture references into his sets. Moreover, he’s also one of a few VJ’s that make it possible to utter the sentence ‘I saw a VJ last night’ and not have a room of full of strangers laugh at you.
Compared to his contemporaries, Yoda has evolved to take his audience on a careful ADD trip through the history of popular music and culture.
Hearing a DJ scratch and claw his way through a catalogue of nursery rhymes, soul, reggae, 80 synth pop, rock, hip-hop, drum and bass and dubstep is engaging enough, but then imagine throwing in 2012s most YouTube-able moments and footage from music videos, video games, television and movies. That’s the kind of skullduggery that DJ Yoda unleashed on the audience at Academy.
Over the next two hours, those gathered at Academy witnessed something so outrageous it’s barely even possible to detail. But imagine the Muppets lip-synching the Beastie Boys – So What Cha Want chopped up with Karl Stefanovic’s Dali Lama pizza gaffe and the Tetris theme song.
By the time Charlie Sheen was projected on the screen bragging about ‘banging seven gram rocks’ over a chorus of burbling baselines and synchs, Yoda had finished enchanting the crowd.
As DJ Yoda closed his set, I turned to those around me out of curiosity to see the who’s who of Canberra DJs alongside people who would have just been happy to hear the Party Rockers Anthem for the umpteenth time, all with their mouths agape, heads bobbing and feet shuffling.
