RICHARD BELL tries on Birth CTRL Z @ Cellar, Frewin Court.

Launching a new night can be a difficult thing to do.

There are a great many things you need to get right to ensure that your night is a rabble-rousing, dance-floor-stomping-success.

Unfortunately these things don’t always converge in exactly the right way, which is why I have been to a huge number of awesome nights that have been very poorly attended, the organisers having got the music right, the venue right, the atmosphere right and even some great deals to make the price right, and yet, because there’s a big night on at Lava Ignite, no-one turns up to find out just how good the new event is.

This is a terrible shame, and certainly says something rather ugly about our capacity for breaking routines and experimenting with new experiences in the city.

Often, however a night can fail because it’s trying to stuff itself into an already overcrowded market place, and this can be the fatal mistake that will taint any new indie electro night.

Every other week I seem to be attending one of these which is luckily something I don’t mind as I love them.

The difficulty with it can be that Oxford already plays host to a number of excellent indie nights, and to stand out from the crowd, you really need to be offering something fresh, different and exciting.

Birth CTRL Z, I’m afraid, doesn’t fit into this category.

For such a night to be successful it has to be so up-to-date that it’s practically set in the future.

They need to be mixing classic tunes like Hot Chip, Hercules and Love Affair and Bloc Party, with a whole load of stuff that people have never heard of, overstuffing their sets with remixes that were only posted about an hour before the night kicked off.

Birth CTRL Z suffers from this problem.

Even just scanning their flyer, I can’t see any acts who released a new song in the last couple of months, and this unfortunately creates the impression that it would have been an awesome little indie electro night five years ago, but not today.

Also, the name is utterly bizarre – I’m assuming it’s a misguided attempt to include some sort of computer speak, but frankly the last thing I want to be thinking about when I’m trying to dance with a cute indie girl is clinical contraception.

As I’ve said, trying to start a night at a new venue can be a difficult thing and so it pains me not to support it.

But frankly, Birth CTRL Z isn’t trying hard enough.