Things that run atop the long weekend eve tend to lean themselves toward the fiendish and inquisitive and Slow It Down, Baby at the Gaso was, fortunately, no different. Emerging from a well that savoured the tortoise as opposed to the drowned rabbit, Slow It Down, Baby offered an evening of undulating body heats and outward nostalgia for the eyewitness moments. The Gaso, with all of its floral antennae and pragmatic bartenders, was a fitting site for tempo transgressions and kinetic exploration. Through perspiring elbows, I watched updraughts of incense and cantering Spanish guitar skewer the senses of second-tier onlookers and re-introduce taste to smokers. Downstairs, tongues were waggling as the DJ rolled low cannon balls before a drawling disco ball and its apprentices below. With the haunches aroused, phones sheathed, and the faders taut, Slow It Down, Baby developed into a sprawling dancefloor with a gravity that sucked every sentient in sight into its supple fold.
The colours at Slow It Down, Baby were soft, and the demands measured, projections of the party’s ethos stretched between a bruised peach and premature sunset. A trumpet gyrates across the system as the twinks salute and heave; Slow It Down, Baby was riddled with a cackling few. Folk drinking from keep cups made of crackers, hikers fashioning Trangia strapped chaps, DJs wearing rhythms like scuff marks and boiz descending balustrades instead of stairs. Playfulness was aching in every corner, and as one musickers said next to me, “this place feels like a guilty pleasure”. While Slow It Down, Baby did not adhere to a strict pitched-down policy, I don’t think that was its point, more, it was an encouragement to unshackle from tendencies of club nights to ascend in tempo instead of mobility. Slow It Down, Baby was trying to cater for the bell curve and the pods of dolphins that fancy a bob between sets. Interspersed this with careful atmospheric adjustments of haze, smell and shadow, and offers dancers different focal points for curiosity and interrogation. Slow It Down, Baby demonstrated the potential for these sorts of nights and the desire for their continuity. More importantly, it encouraged a paradigm shift for a body corporate imbued with peak-time apprehension.
Listen back to CFK and Greetings B2B set here.
Words: Elwyn
