DJ Felipe Lira @ Parking - June 6, 2009

Vancouver I’ve heard is beautiful, Toronto is interesting, but I believe it was Montreal where Felipe Lira found what he came for, a crowd that challenged him to play his best.

Scheduled to start playing at 12:30am, I had the chance to catch up with him before and exchange some words. What can I say, a very down-to-earth type of guy, with such a great smile in his face. Felipe Lira got called to play in Toronto after someone at Fly Nightclub heard one of his podcast, don’t know how he ended up in Vancouver, and thank you Parking for bringing him to Montreal.

Remember, this is my personal view of the night, and I’ll try to be short because I know everyone has such busy schedule, working life eh?

Patrick Guay finished his set, great warm up by the way, the music stopped and this is when Felipe Lira started to play with and for the crowd. One thing I realized with the new DJ booth set up, from the dance floor is hard to see what the DJ is doing now, not so important for some Djs (we might miss Peter Rauhofer smiling), but in some cases, as with Felipe Lira, some of the human energy is not fully transferred to the crowd. Nevertheless, you can always go behind the booth and check what is going on.



Interesting start of the night, right away tribal established itself as the music for the evening, but I wasn’t sure what kind of tribal. I believe at the beginning Lira started to test the crowd, looking for “the” music he was going to dish out, and finally when he had found the magic touch, I felt like I got slapped in the face with tunes that made my body shake of pleasure.

House music, some with a minor touch of electro, great vocals, some of which were initially presented in a cappella, then plunged into some known and others into unknown music. Sometimes you would start hearing a song and you would recognized it right away, what you didn’t expect was the Lira twist added to the song, most of the time he would speed up the dance floor with his drums; other times he would slow it down, with some baladaish type of moment, then rapidly returning to the tribal, with the help of several divas. Also heard some new stuff, which I’m sure are either Felipe’s own production, or coming from somewhere in the Southern hemisphere.

One thing I noticed was of the explosion of sensual energy at Parking, a little bit more and it would had become a musical orgy, or maybe it did and perhaps because I was so tangled in the moment I might have missed to witness such a beautiful thing, or maybe I was part of it? - I have to think about that. Everyone was so happy and “touchy”, and the dance floor did not stop one minute, and when the music is good, hot sweaty bodies will be found everywhere in the premises of the building.

I did go behind the DJ booth a couple of times, and let me tell you, this guy is not only good as a DJ, but he also knows how to dance, now try to synchronize spinning and dancing at the same time, that is a show by itself, and if you saw it you know what I’m talking about.



First time seeing Felipe Lira, and after such a wonderful evening I’m almost sure this is not going to be his last visit to Montreal. I couldn’t stayed until the end, left at around 3:00am and the place was still rocking.