No Cry Baby

Owners of Melbourne’s Wah Wah Lounge went on a trans-continental odyssey of discovery prior to fitting out the two-storey dance club, eventually returning with a Euro lighting feature inspired by a Daft Punk video clip, and installed by designer Ritchie Park. The $40,000 lighting gizmo is central to the ‘sensory experience’ of Wah Wah, taking it as far away as possible from the previous threadbare hangout, 2 Floors Up. The feature is the largest of its kind in the world, and is made up of multiple banks of eight plastic covered dome lights controlled by E:cue software; syncing with the DJ it can also put ‘writing on the wall’. Audio is provided by a Funktion One system that apparently only gets pushed to half its hefty potential. The club is licensed for 230 people, and according to Wah Wah marketing manager, Ravi Chand, is perennially packed. The downstairs area carries more of a champagne lounge feel, and serves as a chandelier-hanging holding zone for punters before they’re unleashed on the pulsating dancefloor. venue picks up the story with Chand: “Crowd and promoter selection are the two main factors for achieving the balance we have. Because we’re not a large venue we can be very selective with the people we let through. If we get a sense that people are going to be aggressive at all, we’ll leave them outside. We have a very clean crowd, predominantly females. The type of people that would go to Summadayze and take their tops off, you won’t find them here. We’re not really a commercial club, so we get a good mixture of young and old that appreciates tough electro.”We maintain our credibility by not being a club full of marketing fluff. Where other clubs will just promote the biggest international DJs that are around at the time, we search for the new producers and the new local talent, put them in recording studios and develop them. That way it works both ways, because the tracks they produce in the studio are the tracks that you can only hear here — that’s what gives us our cutting edge.”