Pure Radio Cybersex

Pure Radio Cybersex was a Subcity club night held on the 14th of January, 2023. The name was originally coined when web coordinator Ada wrote an early draft of the relaunched subcity.org's first blog post. It references the phrase "Pure Radio Sex", which appears in a newspaper clipping from Subcity's initial 1995 debut. The party was intended as a launch party for the revamped site, with a cyber y2k theme to honour the 2000s era web subcity.org hoped to evoke. The party ended up briefly predating the official 2023 relaunch of subcity.org, however the site had secretly been on the open web in an unfinished state for months prior.

The party filled both floors of Stereo- the upstairs lineup saw Machines in Heaven from 23:30-00:30, Convolve from 00:30-01:30, and Aposympiesis from 01:30-02:30. Downstairs was opened by Isotope from 23:00-00:00, followed by Phlox from 00:00-01:00, Asphalt Gesundt b2b Surface Tension from 01:00-02:00, and closer EXTRAMUNDANE w/ Cat Lady from 02:00-03:00.

Design

Poster and Comms

The design process for the event's promotional materials started with a collaborative moodboard on padlet, where team members uploaded images they felt fit the aesthetic.

The final poster was a 3D render made in Blender, utilising textures created in Milkdrop 2. Milkdrop, the music visualiser from winamp, became a large part of the design language of PRCS; the initial announcement video heavily featured its cyberdelic patterns, and the sound reactive visualiser was displayed on stage at the event. The poster borrows from the aesthetic of the covers of turn-of-the-millenium maths textbooks, liquid drum and bass mixes, and video games. In fact, the final poster featured a little badge parodying the PEGI logo found on all video game covers in the UK, in the same location as it would be on a game. This little design was later turned into a sticker.

Club Production/Set Design

The set design for the stage downstairs tried to bring the event poster to life. The Pure Radio Cybersex text was cut out of large sheets of foam poster board and reinforced with bamboo sticks. The reflective spheres from the poster took the form of silver balloons, which by the end of the night were being torn from their strings and thrown into the crowd with reckless abandon. The Milkdrop visualiser also made an appearance; 5 flatscreen TVs, mostly borrowed from team members, displayed live visuals from a computer running Milkdrop, complete with custom sprites of the cybersex text and logos for each of the DJs. You can see all this in action in the video of the night.

This drawing was made when planning the layout of the club night. The final result was quite similar to this little mock-up, however the TVs ended up being pushed back into an arch to allow an area for gogo dancing, and the small screens on the DJ booth did not materialise. 5 TVs were used instead of 4, and the strobe was raised up to be above and behind the central TV.

Video

Two MiniDV cameras were used to capture the night in beautiful era-appropriate standard definition. In the video, you can see the setup of the stage, and then fragments of many of the sets, the stunning energy of the crowd, and some unique interview tactics from Imogen.

Instagram Promo