A New Year's Day in the Park: Let Them Eat Cake 2016 Reviewed

Werribee Park has a day spa. The mansion that looms over the park is popular wedding venue and the surrounding gardens are green and leafy – an upscale venue for a boutique electronic festival. Maybe this is why the audience is so goddamn chill. Maybe it's the cocktails.

Let Them Eat Cake is now four years old and the promoters are on point with everything. Four ornate stages are set on four shady lawns within spitting distance of each other, but perfectly angled to minimise bleed from the bass-heavy speakers. The Food Rave is stocked with high class treats from Melbourne's best food trucks and the bars are staffed by real bartenders, serving cocktails with garnish in real wine glasses. The whole event screams attention to detail – not least in the music lineup.

LTEC 2016 has an eclectic, off centre palette embracing techno, house, dubstep, hip hop, RnB and future soul. New Year's Day day kicks off with top local talent, including head-to-head live sets from Lucianblomkamp and Harvey Sutherland, and a spray from house party heroes Silent Jay and Friends. By mid-afternoon, a back-to-back roster of international genius has taken over the stages. Hessle Audio founder Ben UFO shoots out an early afternoon rainbow, dropping fat bubbles of house and disco for a small but delighted crowd, from the Pyramid-shaped Bastille stage on the festival's main lawn. Over on the Guillotine Stage, beneath an ornate elephant head, Motor City Drum Ensemble is fired up and booming, driving the crowd into a frenzy with his no-fucks-given electro funk earthquake.

By mid-afternoon, we're drinking lychee juice and gin under the shade of a giant fern and all is right with the universe. Four Tet opens with the dulcet sounds of reggae and cruising funk, and the crowd is fidgeting, but half an hour in he drops "Love Cry" and all is forgiven. His two hour set is a cross genre monster, from deep house to ratcheting dubstep and Afro-Caribbean cuts, but his best tunes are his own.

Ame hits the decks in the late afternoon, playing unbroken trance beats for three solid hours to a small army of munted party goers. At the back of main lawn, kids wander in and out of the mist tent, an art installation filled with dry ice and confusion. Around the corner on the Versailles Stage, Slum Village kick up a storm with the funk-heavy hip hop and Machinedrum follows up with a solid hour of woozy, rib-shaking beats.

Those who are feeling especially loose come 8pm head over to the swamp shack to watch five cute girls in CRXZY SXXY CXXL spin RnB tunes; the rest of us stay to watch Com Truise punch the sky with his yacht-rocking beats, wild electronic noise and sick transitions. The New York producer is a revelation. He's got tough competition too, with Daniel Avery hitting hard four-on-the-floor doof from the Bastille stage and DJ Tennis lighting up a massive house party on the Guillotine stage. Tennis plays the Four Tet Eric Prydz remix and the crowd loses their shit.

Let Them Eat Cake 2016 closes out with Avery and Tennis, and man of the millennium on the Versailles stage. Jon Hopkins comes in late for a live set, the peak of a festival that is pretty much all peak. Hopkin's beautiful, organic visuals wrap around the sound - billowing melodies that lift us up in ecstatic waves. He plays "Open Eye Signal". The roar from the audience is off the charts, heavy, wild and sweet.