Sick Individuals live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 13 September 2013

Music until 3 a.m. with a valid wristband was the line that mattered on the billing for Friday, 13 September 2013. Everything else was plain: a $10 admission, a 19+ rule with photo ID, and the address, 16 Cumberland Street South. The headliners were Sick Individuals, “the Dutch duo”, at what the promoter called the Frosh Weekend Bash.

Loffredo & Associates presented the night with H.I.T Management, and the announcement went up on 31 July. The billing promised “world class DJs live in downtown PA”, and PA is short for Port Arthur, the northern half of the city before it merged with Fort William in 1970 to form Thunder Bay.

A wristband and a 3 a.m. finish

The 3 a.m. finish sits against Ontario’s licensing hours. Last call in an Ontario bar is 2 a.m., and patrons are cleared out by 3, so the billed end of the music was the latest a licensed room could run. The last hour was a dance floor without bar service.

A frosh weekend is a North American ritual: first-year students arrive in a new city, and the orientation events fill the first days of term. Thunder Bay has Lakehead University and Confederation College, so the word had a local audience.

The wristband line suggests a night tied to that weekend, though the billing did not spell out how one was obtained.

The price is worth setting beside the rest of 2013. Prices for 2013 shows at the room in this record run from $10 to $40, and this night sat at the bottom of that range. Raekwon’s advance ticket in February 2012 cost $25.

That Raekwon night was a Tuesday, and ten dollars for a headline DJ act on a Friday is the kind of number a student budget was built to absorb.

The age line is a reminder that frosh week and the drinking age do not line up. In Ontario the legal age is 19, and many first-years would have been 18. Photo ID was required, and the 19+ rule applied to the whole room.

Who Sick Individuals were

Sick Individuals are Ray Hofstee and Jim Smeele, from Hilversum in the Netherlands. They met in 2008 while studying music composition and made the partnership official in 2010. Hilversum is the Dutch media town, home to much of the country’s broadcasting. Their sound comes from tech house, electro house and progressive house, and their listed influences are Daft Punk, Bingo Players and Swedish House Mafia.

Two of their 2013 releases reached number one on Beatport. One was I Am with Axwell and the singer Taylr Renee, on Axwell’s Axtone label. Axwell is one third of Swedish House Mafia, a group the duo names among their influences, so the collaboration closed a loop.

The other track, Blueprint, was a partnership with Dannic on Revealed Recordings. Both belong to 2013, the same year as the Thunder Bay date, which puts the booking in the year their name spread beyond the Netherlands. Neither track is named in the Crocks billing.

The Crocks billing sold them by nationality, not by chart position. That is a reading of the copy, not a stated intention, but a Dutch name did carry weight in electronic music in 2013, and the billing used it.

The weekend around it

The night stood at the head of a busy weekend. The next evening Elliott Brood played an early concert, and a DJ dance party followed it. So the same room ran a Dutch dance night on Friday and an alt-country band on Saturday.

A fortnight later Mysto and Pizzi played on Friday 27 September. The three September dates were announced on the same day, 31 July, which gave the room six weeks of notice for the first and more than eight for the last.

Friday the 13th is only a coincidence of the calendar, and nothing in the announcement mentions it. Other dance nights at the club are on the shows page, and the crowd on the night went unrecorded.