NEO is a brand new event ran by Cypher from Leeds in conjunction with hard house promoter Fluffy. This was their first event and the ethos behind it was to bring together all the different rave music styles under one roof. It was held at The Sanctuary nightclub in Birmingham, former home to Gods Kitchen and Sundissential.

I arrived here just after it was scheduled to start at 10pm. There was a reasonable queue outside at this point and the doors opened around 40 minutes late. I was given a reasonably thorough search by the security as I first came in. The last time I was here 18 months ago for Sundissential the security really were terrible, with them deliberately being heavy handed and intimidating. I had been told before the event by the Cypher promoters that the security had been changed since then and thankfully they had. The security here on the night were fine.

I dropped off my coat in the cloakroom and went to check out the venue. The ground floor arena was being used by Fluffy for the hard house room and this was a fair sized arena. The sound system in here was much too quiet though and this was the case throughout the whole night. The main arena was the Cypher room and the system in here was much better, with it easily loud enough. This arena has the DJ box right at the back then in front of that is a big stage where people can dance, and then there is a good sized dancefloor as well. Going up a level leads to a balcony which overlooks the main arena, and up here are seats to chill out in. Upstairs was a cafe which did a really good selection of hot food and had loads of seats in. There were two UV stalls in the club which sold loads of different things, one was in the cafe and one was in the main arena. The main arena had loads of painted banners hanging off the balcony and there were inflatables, a powerful green laser and a video projector which projected above the DJ box.

The first set I saw on the night was Mark EG at 11. He played purist techno for the first 20 minutes then moved onto acid trance for the remainder to give a good set overall. Then I went down into the Fluffy arena to catch some hard house. I'm not sure who the DJs were but they did a good set which included the BK remix of "9 Bar" and the classic KY Jelly Babies remix of "Access". The decks were jumping quite badly in this set and the DJs managed to make the best of a difficult situation.

After this I went back into the main arena at 1am. This was due to be the headliners Hennes and Cold but these had to cancel as Hennes had broken his leg. The promoters replaced them with hard trance DJ A*S*Y*S* and this was a good choice as he played a storming set. He started off with the wicked "Trance and acid" by Kai Tracid and then dropped in other hard trance monsters like "Hardcore will never die" by Warmduscher and "Xray (follow me)" by Spacefrog, before finishing off with "Hallucination Generation" by Fallout Boy.

I didn't really catch the following set so the next set I saw was the Nu Energy PA at 3am. This was done by Sharkey, Kevin Energy and K Complex, and they'd also bought along former Helter Skelter stage dancer Vinny, the best male stage dancer I've ever seen. He was letting off party popper cannons on stage and handing out free Nu Energy mix CDs of older freeform tunes. They were on for an hour altogether and it was pretty much all new stuff, with the exception of "Vertigo". They did a new remix of "The Baptism" and the tunes tended more towards uplifting than dark. The PA even got co-promoter Toby dancing on stage. :)

I then went back down to the Fluffy arena to catch some more hard house and it was Shan on the decks. He did a good set which included "Busted" by The Guvnors and the classic Ian M remix of "Observing the earth" but someone unfortunately collapsed halfway through this set. He was having a fit on stage and this wasn't good to see so I left the arena. The security were quickly onto it though and around four of them came running into the arena to sort it out.

It was then back upstairs to see Cypher resident Ginge finish off the penultimate hour of the night. He did a mixture of freeform tunes like "Distornord" and then played loads of Evolution tunes like "Pilgrim". The final set of the night was Scott Brown and the majority of his set was Evolution tunes like "Elysium +" and "Gang Bang Society", and he also played a brand new remix of "Turn up the music". For his last 20 minutes he played some really dark nu-style gabba which I hadn't heard before but was all good stuff. The security wouldn't let him do the traditional "one more tune" but he had ran slightly over the 6am finish anyway.

Overall this was pretty impressive for a first event. I'd guess the turnout was around 4-500 which was a good solid start for them. I liked the varied line up they had in the main arena and they'd arranged it so that the music progressively got harder throughout the night, with Scott Brown playing nu-style gabber right at the very end. There were no MCs at all during the night which was unusual for a rave but I thought it worked really well. The crowd in the main arena included lots of hard house type people but these all seemed to be enjoying the hardcore at the end, although some of them seemed a bit lost when the gabber came on. :)

Scott Brown and Mark Eg both did good sets but for me A*S*Y*S just beat the Nu Energy PA to set of the night with a storming hard trance set. Criticisms I would make are that there were no lineup posters anywhere in the venue for either of the two arenas, and that the sound system in the Fluffy hard house room just wasn't loud enough. The positives massively outweighed the negatives though. NEO return to the Birmingham Sanctuary on Friday December 6th with another varied lineup which includes Yoji Biomehanika, The Crow, Mark EG and DJ Sy. After this event I know I'll be there. :)

Shouts to Toby and Paul Cypher, Lee UHF, Steph, Number 2301, Adam, Scottie, Kaine, Dodgee, Ravegirl, Kevin Energy and Sharkey.

- Chedda (chedda@ush.net)