The Karachi-based arts and live music company presented DJ/producer Turhan James who opened for French electronic duo FDVM featuring Florent Denecker & Victorien Mulliez.
To their credit, Salt Arts, who launched Salt Flights initiative in 2019, had just three days to promote their show featuring Turhan James and French duo FDVM featuring Florent Denecker & Victorien Mulliez.
And yet, they managed to sell a good number of tickets to both boys and girls and no complaints were made to the company as Instep confirmed post-haste.
This is the goodwill Salt Arts has earned since starting out in 2015. And their aesthetics were also still in place. On one end was the Redbull booth where you could get the drink, backed by a screen featuring laser lighting display; on the stage like every show of Salt Arts, the screens had its own visuals on cue (including a Shamoon Ismail music video playing who is set to play Super Salt 2019) and a fantastic Hamza Akram Qawwal (Super Salt 2019), Fareed Ayaz and Abu Mohammed visual concoction running with the music. It was almost surreal.
As Turhan played, confetti dropped on the audience and again when FDVM were playing their set.
The DJ booth did not have any obnoxious branding but a small logo of Redbull on the right side of the booth, which wasn’t much considering the screens behind were running Salt Arts visuals primarily including things like, ‘Karachi, you’re our number 1 audience.”
One also spotted some stars, some were backstage like Ahad Raza Mir and Sajal Aly while models such as Zara Abid were dancing to the tunes of Turhan without a care in the world.
Karachi danced to the beats of Turhan James, who brought a much more eloquent and yet still electronic dance music set to the event, followed by the very popular FDVM who opened with the crowd favourite ‘Edit Tribute of Disco Deewane’ bringing to mind the late Nazia Hassan and after that, there was no looking back. They danced on stage, got the audience involved and were just very charming. Their music is a blend of house and disco and within it there is a meeting of genres within genres. You can dance to it but you can also chill to it – that’s the beauty of FDVM.
It wouldn’t be unfair to say some of the people who saw them at Solis Arts and Music Festival followed them to the Salt Arts show and there were those who tried to invade other people’s space or misbehave; those noticed have been blacklisted. But the idea behind the show was to let – not just the elite – but everyone have access to a show like this if they paid for the ticket. Salt Arts maintains that 60 per cent of its audience is female and thus they take every precaution possible. There were people who tried to smoke inside even though the announcement to not smoke was made pre-show.
However, by and large, people were just dancing and having a good time. If Turhan James played a set that was both obscure as well as featured electronic dance music flair, FDVM played house and their trump cards as well as music that they once admitted in an interview with Instep cannot be classified.
EDM concerts do tend to attract a certain kind of crowd that a qawwali wouldn’t. It’s just the rules of the music business. But the good news for music fans is that with the kind of genre diversification Salt Arts has in mind with each show, such occurrences will continue to be too few and far in between, at least with their shows. Hallelujah to that!