Caribou provide a lift to an otherwise inadequate Warehouse Project

The Warehouse Project is a strange place. Literally underground, it is an industrial uterus that for eight hours a night incubates nearly two thousand dancing embryos before spitting them out into the icy streets of Central Manchester. To some it has a chic to it that few other clubs can hope to attain, yet to my mind the perceived coolness of the WHP is an illusion that fades on closer inspection. Yes it has a grimy veneer of underground exclusivity, but this image is cultivated by the clicking, whirring cogs of the marketing machine: its coolness is no longer organic; it is cool because we are told it is cool. However this issue is academic: on nights which are as profligately expensive as the WHP (£1.50 delivery charge on an email, anyone?), what really matters is the standard of entertainment on offer. Regrettably on Saturday at the event curated by Kieran Hebden this standard was, on average, low.

A surfeit of headline acts should have guaranteed a good night but perhaps inevitably didn’t. Early on saw London based dubstep duo Mount Kimbie perform before a densely packed crowd in the back room whilst the main arena remained vacuum-like, so sparse was the audience – something that to my mind was an oversight in the billing of the acts. Nevertheless the high attendance of Mount Kimbie remains a mystery to me offering as they did what can only be described as an irritating soundscape of voicey pads and deep kicks, although it was evident I was in the minority in my disappointment: the ambient textures and multitudinous sine waves of the basslines proved more than enough to excite the scores of moustachioed hipsters that surrounded me into dancing the annoying side to side shake of the middle class dubstep fanboy.

I feel I shouldn't continue without mentioning the awful sound quality in the back room: sure, nobody is expecting a brickwork batcave to have brilliant acoustics, but the muddiness of the bass and general poor definition of the music was an insult to both the audience and the artists performing. Enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a bad spelling and cheap mask Zomby succeeded Mount Kimbie and the beginning of his set was marked by an influx of cool kids with accessory headphones and ill-fitting trousers, which while not a problem in itself did necessitate the crowd having to pack themselves up even more tightly to the grubby walls which were by that time secreting a sweet cocktail of condensed sweat and groundwater.

Zomby performs anonymously in a mask which is presumably for either of or a combination of two reasons: A) that he’s acutely, bumhole-achingly fugly, or B) because he’s bald and the use of ostentatious headgear is the only possible way to disguise his naked Cro-Magnon of a skull whilst also in a Lady-Gaga’s-cameltoe-esque way, distract from the tepid mediocrity of his music. Obviously it is hard to confirm or deny either of these because the man really is SUCH an enigma. Whilst he played a varied set, I'm afraid I just don't get his rave-inspired retrostep which for me falls on the wrong side of cloyingly nostalgic rather than a cutting edge update of early 90s sounds.

In the main room headliner Four Tet played to a huge proportion of the sold out crowd causing the front three areas of the labyrinthine venue to become innavigable for the duration of his performance, although the banality of the performance itself proved to the rear five hundred people in the crowd why it wasn't worth pressing through the crush to get to the front anyway. And crush is the right word: when the WHP is sold out, there are so many bottlenecks in the seething mass of human beings it can feel quite unpleasant. I must admit before I saw him I was not greatly familiar with his work, but for an artist with a reputation like Four Tet's I had high hopes. However he disappointed me greatly: Three Tet at best.

On a positive note, mathematician and music producer Caribou - who took to the stage after Four Tet with accompanying musicians as a live band – was excellent. By far the most enjoyable act of the evening the band had an impressive stage presence and was complemented by a vibrant light show on the monolithic LCD screen which stood behind them – in fact, the screen was so good it made me wonder why it hadn’t been put to better use by earlier acts, most of whom utilised nothing but a thin spot illuminating a turntable and, because they were too cool for school, an Apple Mac. Genuinely Caribou were the only act the whole evening that made me want to dance. Not that I did – I'm too white. But I tried. My face gripped in a rictus of concentration I moved my feet around and up and down and did my best to further compact the thick stratum of unidentifiable dark-coloured detritus which always accumulates on the floor this dark musical car park, and lo, it was good.

So, yes, Caribou were great. However even with their LCD screen shooting out bright rays of primary-coloured happiness, they were not able to offset the balance of the evening, which over the preceding few hours had tipped firmly in the favour of inadequate.

The Warehouse Project 2010 is turning out to be a real let-down.

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