Taking to the stage after an early spot guesting with Ground Components as they ended their particularly freewheeling and anarchic set, Miss Macro introduced her reason for wanting to party tonight: she’s about to depart for an extensive US tour; this being her last show in Australia for over three months. So she invites Melbourne to enjoy, as the title track on her Moments in Movement debut has it, the balloons, confetti and kites she has as props tonight.

Performing at the trashed end of the day, the audience support, at first, is strong up the front and disappointing up the back. Ever the performer, though, Macro brings the crowd together; by mid-set, the crowd is hands-in-the-air positive, bowing to the stage in time with the nimble beats of her debut. It’s not all previously recorded territory though. Macro spices the middle of the set with some selections from a new mixtape: most notably we get great Macro takes on “Mr. Me Too” by Clipse and “My Love” by Justin Timberlake, spitting her sharp rhymes over the top of these two brilliant 2006 productions. She also treats the crowd to a rare spot of her beatboxing and a more familiar dose of her spoken word.

As she ranges across the stage, long black curls emphasising her nodding and bobbing head, Macro unites the earnest and the playful. At one point, she gives an RIP shout-out to Alice Coltrane, James Brown and Anna Nicole-Smith – gathering together her wanderings in the experimental scene while acknowledging the debt of hip-hop to funk and her fascination with what ugliness is tossed up by modern society. Later on, she chimes in with a “fuck Dick Cheney, fuck Bush, fuck war” plea. In this place of noisomely overpriced and decadent partying, someone needed to let the world outside back in. Praise be to Macro.

by Ben Gook