Everything about techno, I learned at Sunday School …
- Preaching to the choir at Sunday School for Degenerates …
Can you make it until the bitter end? That’s the question that the Sunday School for Degenerates party has been asking Miami for the last four years. After the week, after Ultra, after Conference, at the end of the weekend, do you have the strength for one last show? For the last two years, a few friends and I have answered that call.
Whichever of us were still standing dragged ourselves for the final shout for mayhem and chaos, first to the Pawn Shop in 2008, and then to the Ice Palace in 2009. We were wrecked, exhausted, sunburned, cranky, hungry and broke. Our clothes were dirty, our shoes had holes in them, and our heads had been stuffed with so much music that there was absolutely no room for any more. At all. Period.
And yet SSFD, for the past two years, has been the best party, the best music, the best experience at WMC for those of us who made it. 24 hours from start to finish, each party would stand on its own as event that you would spend a month preparing for and a month recovering from. And yet here it is, at the tail end of the madness. When you have nothing else to give, it whispers in your ear, demanding that you sacrifice your very soul to Techno.
Ha. I’m just kidding. It’s only music.
Right?
A few hundred zombies inside. A few hundred of the walking dead outside. A few thousand monsters and vampires in each direction. It’s too hard to count the numbers. There’s a canopy and some burning sunshine. Walls of speakers against a fence. A school bus. An ice cream truck. A thunderstorm and wet grass. There’s Sebo K. The best set of WMC 2008. There’s Ida Engberg. She’s playing peak hour techno at noon, 14 hours after we straggled in. It was the best set of WMC 2009, hands down.
But don’t worry. You don’t have to believe me. Like with any show, everyone has their own personal experience with their own musical tastes and their own set of friends. It’s literally impossible to describe a day-long party, especially with the performers that Made Events brings to their Sunday School. There are no words to convey what it means to be able to take a nap on a couch and feel safe, knowing that a few hours later Seth Troxler will be waking you up.
Bring it.
To Ultra or Not to Ultra
Ryan Xristopher
Mainstage at Ultra 2007
Something I’ve gotten tired of as I’ve gotten older is people telling me what I do or don’t like. Hey, you can’t like football if you like techno. You can’t like folk music. You can’t like PBR. You can’t like dubstep if you like house music. You can’t like house music if you like dubstep. You can’t like minimal if you listen to anything else, and you can’t like anything else if you listen to minimal. You can’t like this because you like that; you have to like this because you don’t like that. Enough already!
Each year I’ve gone to WMC, I’ve hear the same thing, though in the three years it’s gotten progressively worse.
“What do you mean you’re going to Ultra?”
It’s for kids, for posers, for the masses, for people who don’t know about the intimate cool parties or the super underground shows that start in somebody’s apartment at 7 in the morning. I love the intimate parties, I dig the underground, but if you’re even the least bit interested it what it means to be big, bright, and loud – go to Ultra.
Just in terms of size and scope, it’s one of the bigger production efforts in the world of the electronic music scene. Literal mountains of speakers and phenomenal visual presentation are what Ultra is all about, with however many tens of thousands of people all mashed together, milling in Bicentennial Park.
The music there isn’t generally groundbreaking. The mainstream trance, progressive, drum and bass, and techno performers generally play about what they should, and everybody has a good time listening to things they’ve already heard. If you’re looking for what’s next in music, look elsewhere. However, if just want to relax into the comfortable – go to Ultra.
It gets a little hard to move around eventually, especially after dark, and you can take or leave your social commentary about the state of the rave scene and candy kids if you start observing your surroundings too critically. But if you want big and booming, if you want a loud, anonymous, organic experience – go to Ultra.
There are always few standout performances there, too, so don’t automatically discount the musical potential, either. Loco Dice and Luciano in the Carl Cox tent last year was mindblowing. Ferry Corsten is always a trip to watch. Josh Wink three years ago. Deadmau5 put on quite a show a few years back. Roni Size Reprazent. Etc.
It’s worth mentioning that Sasha & Digweed will always have a special place in my heart because of Ultra. Three years ago, playing in the rain under garbage bags, absolutely crushing everyone brave enough to dance through the storm. And those who saw Sasha & Digweed’s set two years ago were certainly treated properly. I remember they closed out with “Total Departure”, and as the music faded out into complete silence, there were several thousand people holding their brains in with one hand and picking up their jaws from the floor with the other.
Some of the main performances have a tendency to fall flat on the big stages, too, if they aren’t careful. The Tiesto, Paul Van Dyk, Prodigy, BT, Richie Hawtin-type shows can be a little too hyped for what you actually get.
Whatever you decide though, to Ultra or not to Ultra, just make sure it’s your own decision, so you won’t regret it later. It’s not always good, but it’s always fun.
Tiny Event Review – Joker In Seattle
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Event Review – Joker in Seattle @ The War Room
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Introduction
If you’re following the front edges of the current semi-insider wave of dubstep culture washing over the West Coast right now, you’ve probably heard the name Joker mentioned. His is the shadowed face from the UK’s Bristol, and he is the sound that’s becoming synonymous with the sonic potential (listen to “Digidesign”) of the hybrid dubstep, grime, midtempo movement that’s getting worldwide attention right now, packing clubs and sliding its way into festivals. Don’t worry – every possible variation of the 140 bpm stutter is teasing its influence into the mainstream and the underground alike, whether you like it or not. Face it, or it very well might just stab you in the back.
Joker, much like his cousin-in-sound Flying Lotus, accepts no limits to his productions, has no intention of doing what’s been done before, and claims that video games are one of his biggest musical influences. Officially jumping on to the production scene just a few years ago, Joker already has releases on Hyperdub and Tectonic, two of the biggest tastemaking dubstep labels on the planet, and has done remixes for artists as varied as Adam Freeland, Simian Mobile Disco and the Basement Jaxx. He’s also put together special mixes for experimental music master Mary Anne Hobbs and others, leaving a trail of buzz in his wake. Joker is 21-ish right now, has been DJing since 15, and Pitchfork named him the 2008 Producer of the Year. Bring it on, eh, the next step in the new school is coming round the bend.
On tour, he and MC Nomad breezed through Seattle on a Tuesday night, performing at The War Room in Capital Hill with Seattle locals Introcut and Sublo opening for him. I had not yet seen any of these performers, and I had never been to this venue before – it was a clean slate, let’s get dirty.
Giddy-up.
Joker & MC Nomad
@ The War Room, Seattle November 24th, 2009
Introcut started the night, played sort of a low key set with a little bit of turntablism/scratching mixed in, but had some dull transitions between tracks for someone who’s been around as long as he has. It was good, but not memorable. The sound system was solid and the room filled nicely with all the low tones, as promised by the promoters who advertised that would be more bass in the place for this show. There was no active lighting, which was too bad, but live visuals twisting on the main wall set a nice frame next to the DJ booth.
Sublo came on next, and seemed to be in the middle of some type of an identity crisis. It was tough for me to follow, so I did some people watching and entertained myself with the mixed crowd. There was a group of guys next to me who would stand up periodically and backhand each other in the nads, in sequence around their circle. There was a guy who took up too much room dancing that was either dressed like a pirate or was still hanging on to the Burn, pigtails and black and red-striped socks complementing the standard dirty brown vest. There was the girl talking in the bar line, chattering to the guy behind her in line – “I’ll come and clean your house for free. It’s what I do for a living. I’ll even wear a sexy outfit. You just have to play music for me.”
At The War Room, there’s plenty of space for dancing, nice raised seating along the walls, and the bar and some more seating in a slightly separated room. At this time in the night, there was general milling about, and the common feeling was one of random distraction; definitely not DJ-centric at this point; even the dance floor was wobbling in all directions, chasing butterflies or hunting for the underrepresented female crowd contingent.
Eventually, Sublo retreated into the lowest common denominator of the dubstep movement, the newly-coined sub-genre ‘brostep’ (think Rusko’s “Woo Boost”). Musically empty sequences of sawtooth & sinewave patterns grind on my nerves, but they always seem to be crowd-pleasers for bassheads & crossovers. At the end of Sublo’s set, which seemed to last quite a bit too long, he was really ranging around, playing gabbery remixes (“Rhythm is a Dancer”, anyone?) alongside what sounded like pitch-dropped drum & bass. 12:30 had rolled around, the crowd had thinned (school night, you know).
Joker started at 12:40, cutting out Sublo’s last track and immediately starting into something deeper. There was one big surprise for me right away, and I understood immediately why Joker had brought an MC – he had almost no stage presence at all. Maybe just for this venue, though, or maybe just for this crowd, or on this night … Dressed in black and dark gray, black NY ball cap pulled low, back behind his computer and the 1200’s, just like his promo photos, he is a shadow. Even later, when he took his black jacket off, his gray button-down was a stark contrast to the intricate and explosive music he was playing. MC Nomad, on the other hand, was inviting and visible, and his voice brought all the elements of the music together. Usually, I’ve found MC’s to be a distraction and lessen the quality of the show; this was definitely not the case this time.
It took about 15 minutes for Joker and Nomad to chill the crowd out, tame the levels, settle the energy, and pull everyone together. After that, the show was what I expected and what I had hoped for. Deep, intelligent, grimey. Rhythmically complex, not so much prone to repetition as to variation. Waves of bass, reedy and occasionally jazz-centric synth lines, all wandering around in a big audio soup. Joker was using a vinyl control system through a Mac, not sure which program, and he’s a good DJ, which always helps. Sometimes his chops on the mixer got a little lazy, but you can tell he understands beat-matching, flow, and live audio structuring; those pieces of performance that producers can miss the mark on occasionally.
Halfway through his set, I was happily in the middle of the crowd up front, battling against a bunch of sweaty dudes who kept hugging each other and some poor girl who had no idea what was going on who was randomly headbutting people in their backs, fall over, and then start licking any taker’s faces in the front row. Nice! There were also few elbows and a few stepped-on toes. All in good fun. That’s what we have elbows and toes for.
1:15 and there was a nice controlled frenzy going on, but Seattle’s early club closing rules were about to surface. Relaxed into the best part of his set so far, you could see the surprise on Joker’s face when the bar staff tapped his shoulder at 1:30 and said ‘ten minutes’. Wha? Newcomers to the city are always surprised. I never understand why they aren’t warned.
Nomad hopped on the mic and asked for the last two minutes if we wanted dubstep or drum & bass, and the D&B got a bigger shout, so Joker put on a smashing train of bass and snare snaps for his final cut of the evening.
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Conclusion
I have to admit that I felt a little cheated that we only got about 50 minutes of what should have been an hour and a half show, but what can you do. Joker is going to blow up the rest of the way before too long, but I’m glad I got to see him for a minute before his space gets too crowded. When he’s headlining major shows around the world, I can say to myself in my head, “I remember that one night when …”
-Ryan Xristopher
Comments or corrections: email ryan.xristopher(at)gmail.com
Tiny Album Review – Dorian Concept, “When Planets Explode”
Nine seconds into Dorian Concept’s debut artist album When Planets Explode, and you already know you’re listening to something different. Twenty-eight seconds in, the feeling deepens. Forty-five seconds, and you’ve been pushed off the diving board. Finally, one minute in and you’re surrounded by spider webs of tingly audio madness. Hook, line, and dirty electronica.
Dorian Concept (Oliver Thomas Johnson) has discography credits reaching back to 2005 with some singles and remixes, but When Planets Explode is his debut artist album, and quite the experience it is.
Time, speed, structure, tonality and intent all play hocus-pocus with each other in each of the tracks on this album, though more effectively in first half of the album. A rough, broken down-tempo chug lies underneath most of the synthy abstract textures that he presents, while in the others the beat can be more indeterminate and spacey. Ultimately, though, it almost doesn’t matter how fast the actual beat is going, because you aren’t going to be able to keep up with it anyway.
Cue the tracklist, hit the play button. Giddy-up.
When Planets Explode –
“Clap Beep Boom” is a spectacular introduction into the chaotic and barely controlled audio mangling that happens for the next 32 minutes. More than hear them, you can feel the rhythm and lead segments expanding and contracting, changing their individual swing settings, some parts speeding up, others slowing down simultaneously. You can almost see Dorian turning the knobs in front of you.
“Freehanded Monkey” feels like a walk into an audio insane asylum; the notes in the main hook feel like you’re trying to squeeze peanut butter out from a toothpaste tube. Of all the tracks in the album, this is the one, to truly enjoy it, you just have to let be.
In “Color Sexist”, there’s a tonal phrase in the lead line reminiscent of Jeff Samuel’s fantastic track “Fire” that could keep you happy just playing it on repeat, wondering to yourself, “how the hell do you make that sound?” Listening to the song is like wandering through a park in the daylight kicking people in the shins because you’re convinced they can’t see you.
In “Mesh Beam Splitter”, a slow rolling sine bass wanders on top of a drum-and-bass times two snare drum loop. Think an ocean of dark red Jell-O being spooned over the Little Engine on Meth that Could. Eventually, it all gets covered with coconut sprinkles of arpeggiated modal squawks.
“The Fucking Formula” (originally released in 2008 as a 12”) is possibly the most accessible track of the album, with a dark sawtooth lead line that sounds like a swarm of bees, playing a repeated melodic phrase that gets heads nodding over a basic but happily grimy hip-hop beat.
The second half loses some of the energy that’s been gained so far; shortly after “Four Teen” starts with its quicker and more insistent kick drum you’ve zoned out and can just let yourself wash along in Dorian’s experiments with layers (and layers and layers) of heavy, buzzy bass and lead combinations, moving sort of aimlessly and restlessly around in the headspace he created for you.
“Her Marshmallow Secret” brings you back a little bit with some evolving church organ chords back into a dubby, stripped down arrangement. Voices taper in, eventually giving way to a squelchy, bent lead sequence that talks back and forth with a bassline and some atmospheric pads.
“Two Dimensional”, the last track on the album, is a lullaby to set you back down in the world of the living, a simple two minute piece to ground you back in reality.
When Planets Explode is definitely a meditation on the possibility of soundscaping within the constructs of a musical concept. It’s noisy, it’s random, it’s freeform, sometimes it’s a little shrill, and you may find yourself concentrating so hard on finding something to concentrate on that your lose track of the shattered audio edits that wander around the stereo space.
The album ends a touch abruptly, leaving the listener waiting for more, maybe something bigger, or perhaps some more definite release from the tension, but perhaps that’s what Dorian’s next productions will have in store. Look forward to them …
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Review – Voodeux @ The 2410, PDX Halloween
Halloween 2009. Portland, Oregon, at the 2410. It’s past midnight under a clear, cool sky. There’s a huge glowing head behind the mist, the lights, and a fully loaded and matched JBL sound rig built up like a castle around Voodeux, the duo of Tanner Ross and James Watts.
The crowd is in full dress, angels and demons, bumblebees, gangsters, zombies and farm animals. It’s not crowded; there’s room to move along the sides and even up front. It’s a 21-and over show, so there are no children flopped all over the floor. Everybody’s dancing. The guy dressed up as a cotton ball, or maybe a cloud, is shedding his costume everywhere; people are picking up his pieces and throwing them at each other.
I’ve not seen Tanner and James play together. I caught the Kilowatts (James Watts) performance in the park at the Decibel Festival a month ago; it was deep, downtempo, super clean beats and breaks, driving but simple basslines, textured percussion and melodies, very heady stuff. I’ve listened to Voodeux’s “The Paranormal” album, with its cheeky creepy vibe, its internal dark, distorted and dissonant message.
I did not know what to expect from a live performance.
What I got, and what Portland got, was a hybrid dark techno meets dance meets lets-see-how-hard-we-can-push-the-speakers meets let’s take it all away, piece by piece, and then give it back to them like a gunshot music. Got that?
During lots of typical techno sets, there are lulls where the performers aren’t really taking risks, so the musical rewards are pretty tame. This was not a show for holding back at. Let’s throw some diving elbows, and let’s see who ducks out of the way.
Rumor has it that during their live performances, James does the primary arranging on the fly on his Open Labs DBeat, and Tanner works the levels and the effects processing through his MIDI controllers and the mixer. The tension between the two of them comes in peaks and valleys, the flow of the music is both cooperative and unscripted, but you know when they’re both headed up the same mountain to get to that spot where all the elements come together. Those were the times in the night when the kids in the crowd had wide eyes and were looking at each other saying “holy hell”. At one point there was a musical phrase with a repeating eight-count sine bass tone that made the room feel like an earthquake. Damn. There were a few other tracks during the peaks of the night with crazy layers of full percussion lines, deep kicks and drums dancing around each other – think hearing a house track and a breakbeat at the same time, perfectly synched and with pads and drifting sound effects over top. Whoa.
The music, at times, got a little more experimental and dropped into the realm of mind-provoking bleepy-creepies, but usually what that meant was that the sledge hammer was coming in a minute. Patience, techno-heads, patience!
Overall, the Voodeux show was an absolute success. It was a thoughtful, intelligent booking at a venue that just keeps getting better, with professional sound constantly maintained during the performance and visuals that took the experience to the next level. You can’t ask for much more; you can only look forward to the next time the planets align. Halloween on wax, indeed …
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Album Review – Jogger, “This Great Pressure”
Introduction:
Bear with me, and bear with Jogger, for just a minute.
I heard about the release, and within hours, there are reviews and news, popping up.
They are little techno-color mushrooms after a squall. Little eyeballs into a different world. Watch out for people who like things too much, too quickly; they are trying to trick you. Right?
Boom Boom Chik, Shilo Urban, I Am a Laser, a dazeddigital.com interview …
Cue the tracklist, hit the play button. Giddy-up.
This Great Pressure
I listened to it all the way through, and the word that I kept defaulting back on was “irritating”. The sonic twists and turns were pricking at my ears and my attention; I was having no trouble focusing on the music, but was struggling to find meaning in it.
As the album progressed, a mental image was forming. Two guys facing each other in a sandbox in the middle of a park. In front of one guy, an old Casio synth keyboard he’d just bought from Goodwill (the type with the beige buttons you push for tone selection that say “Piano 1” and “Piano 2”) and an old step sequencer drum machine with a broken tempo knob. And in front of the other guy, a guitar and a banjo, each lightly dusted with attic dirt. Every once in a while, they would pull out drinking straws and shoot spitballs at each other. It was safe to say the story of this music was eluding me.
When I sit down on the couch to really dig into an album, my cats will come to visit and listen with me. Halfway through “Falling”, they both woke up, looked around the room scared, and took off running.
A few tracks later, Jogger deconstructs Booka Shade and M.A.N.D.Y.’s original version of “Superman”, and I am thoroughly unsettled.
But I have a mantra – : Never listen to anything just once.
Some hours later, re-settled, turn the lights off, close my eyes. I hear the cats wander back in and curl up on the couch. Take two.
Right away I can tell my ears are tuned differently. The Allman Brothers String Cheese Incident –esque guitar riffs are more balanced now. Because I know what to expect, the vocal harmonies aren’t tweaking my musical sensibilities anymore. I can hear the care that went into the phrasing of some of the hyper-speed drum sequencing. There’s still a sense of This Is Happening/Now This Is Happening, the A to B switches, like someone is hitting stop on one cassette tape the same time someone else is hitting play, but the deeper layers are becoming more apparent.
I’m in my favorite spot, inside the music instead of outside searching. I’m catching nuances; edits and pieces of stray audio. I know some of the intentional dissonances are coming, so I’m prepared. The Casio keyboard is now on the Piano 1.789 setting. Yep, I think that was just a sheep baa-ing that I heard. Yep. Definitely a sheep.
I remember when I was little, maybe 9 or 10 years old, when my mom wasn’t in the house, my dad would run down and grab a few records out of his collection. He’d play Isao Tomita’s Greatest Hits, Firesign Theatre albums, soundtracks produced by Wendy Carlos. I probably didn’t understand what it meant at the time, but I was feeling the energy of being let in on a secret.
After three listens to “This Great Pressure”, that feeling was back. I doubt Jogger is looking for mainstream fans with this album. This is not a popularity contest, any way you slice it. The music is almost entirely inaccessible if you’re looking for something comfortable to listen to, either as individual tracks or as a compilation. Tunes like “Nephicide” are just as much about you stripping off your layers of bias as they are about anything else. You have to hear it to believe it.
Have no doubt, those two guys in my mental sandbox are grinning at you every time you look away; you just need to take the time to figure out what, exactly, they’re grinning about.
Conclusion:
I’ll bet this album will eventually achieve a dedicated cult following, and the sooner the better. However, if you equate mainstream with quality, then this is probably not your cup of audio tea. Jogger is asking you take take your raincoat off during a tiny hurricane. Let the madness out, friends …
With so many genres trying to hold to their guns, Jogger appears to be a standout in stretching musical boundaries to a philosophical breaking point. What happens, you Heads, when you go faster and slower at the same time? Try it out.
I’m afraid the cats still don’t like “Falling”, but at least they’ve progressed to hiding under the couch instead of in the other room.
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Review – Acid Circus @ The Electric Tea Garden
Introduction:
Acid Circus in Seattle? No way. How did this happen? And how was it going to turn out? Visited their website, listened to their tunes on Soundcloud and their podcast on Projektion. Read some more about Droid Behavior.
Ah ha! So let’s bring some of the West Coast sound, to the West Coast.
Seattle, October 25th, 2009.
I rolled into the Electric Tea Garden right around 12:20am. Same bouncer as the last time I went there to see Derek Plaslaiko at the Sweatbox afterhours for the Decibel Festival. One extra rule though, this time. There had been noise complaints, so if you were going to be outside, you had to be very, very quiet …
The Music:
Kristina Childs was on right when I walked in. The last time I’d seen her play was maybe three years ago spinning some abstract ambient tunes at a venue I don’t remember. Since then, I’ve seen her walking around at events, but not heard her play.
Her set this evening was from 11:30 until 1, so I only caught the last half hour or so – and I truly wish I would have been there at the beginning. It was a pretty self-conscious crowd with their feet glued to the dancefloor when I got there, the ratio of guys to girl at its typical techno slant of 50:1, and nobody had broken through the invisible barrier into that dangerous semi-circle in front of the DJ reserved for the people who belong there.
But the music!
Rowdy, multiple-tempo layers of grimy techno, whoa. I was set for the next 40 minutes. Awesome track selection and sequencing, straight-forward mixing, letting the music speak for itself. Tough, intelligent techno; melodic beats, breaks, fills and build-ups built into the tracks, one or two that I recognized for sure. When the music got going, Kristina’s stage presence was in full effect, too, dancing behind the decks with her red hair flying. Bring it.
For her part of the evening, she was working with vinyl-control Serato on a Mac through a Pioneer DJM600. As much as I appreciate the precision of spinning CD’s, the value of seeing a DJ play a record on a turntable, even if it is just a control disc, is huge. Techno presentation – put the needle on the record!
Acid Circus jumped on right at 1 o’clock, shifting gears down a little bit from the Kristina’s peak-hour flavor and finding a deeper groove right away. The sound they present is hard to describe, other than by saying that its techno for techno-heads. It’s danceable, but it’s not really dance music. It’s usually not musically complicated, but the two brothers are constantly making changes to the effects processing, the samples, the layers, the hits, the rhythms; they pave a road of sound for you to follow, but it’s more like a path into a jungle rather than a highway to a destination.
Their sound is primarily based on techno, but you can hear influence from other genres, and they make especially deep nods to bouncy Chicago house, old school electro, hip-hop and even some progressive melodic sound washes every once in a while.
My only divergences from their set were that their semi-signature tone and timing house synth stabs on top of the techno-minimal percussion structure are sometimes a little too thought-provoking for me (think white toast and apricot jam with coconut sprinkles on top – that kind of thought-provoking); and at one point early in the show, everything got really stripped down, almost to just a drum line, and I lost my way. It was a little like getting trapped in a cave and feeling around for where to put my feet next.
There were plenty of times I wished I could have just stood behind them while they were performing, too, to see what was happening on their computers. There were periods where a whole lot was going on musically, but all they were doing was pushing the channel levels on the mixer up and down, and there were other periods where they were doing all kinds of button pushing and knob-twisting, but the music didn’t seem to be changing much.
Note that Acid Circus is a true live performance. Out in front of them, they each had a Mac and a Native Instruments Maschine controller. Both of their setups were connected to channels on an Allen & Heath Xone:92 mixer that was in between them. As far as I could tell, Vidal was running Ableton on his side and doing most of the mixer work. On the other side, Vangelis was running Traktor Pro, as well as working with an Elektron Machinedrum and an M-Audio Evolution. It was one of the more complicated hardware/software/midi setups I’ve seen, especially for two people to coordinate playing on at the same time.
At one point I stopped dancing to paying attention and watch Vangelis working the drum sequencer on the fly. He was going through the drum sequences sample by sample and putting in and taking out hits for each drum as the sequence was playing. These are incredibly subtle, live changes, almost impossible to pick up on unless you see what the performer is doing and can key in on which sounds are changing as they go. It was a new experience for me to see this live. Nice.
It was also an experience watching the two of them work together. When they were on, they were on. There were moments in the mix when the two of them would move together, unscripted, each working on their own devices, all four channels on the mixer bumping green and blue; moments when they weren’t talking, they just knew what was collectively going on. These were the moments that the crowd had the best interactions with the performance, when the vibe was at its best. These moments were the reason that you came to see Acid Circus.
My knowledge of the gear they were using is pretty limited, and I have no idea their methodology, their planning, or even if they have either of those. But to my thinking, to have two artists synch that well together, I imagine that when technology catches up to what they are capable of as performers, producers and programmers, the techno world is going to get a full dose of what it mean to live inside of music. Watch out.
Jeromy Nail was the closer for the night, and after Acid Circus played a quick encore track, he started off was some dark, dirty, dancey techo. Rad. This is how we finish the night! But, about three tracks in, there was a stutter and he changed gears into more general house tunes. After that I lost the vibe. At 3:30 in the morning, when I’ve been sent on a journey into groove-driven techno, I want the closer to really explore the shadowy edges of what music is – I don’t want to head back to safe ground. This is when I want to hear you take some risks.
The crowd was definitely into it though, so I glided around for a little longer and then rolled out at about 3:40.
The Show:
I like the Electric Tea Garden. It’s comfortable, intimate, there’s seating on one side of the place where it’s a little quieter; the candlelit art gallery, book-ish decorations are cool. I really like the fact that it stays open past 1:45, which has been a stranglehold on the Seattle music scene in more mainstream places for a while now. But I have some issues with the ETG, especially with an event like this.
First of all, the sound.
Part of what makes techno unique is its spectral depth, its textures, and its dynamics. To let techno breathe, you have to be able to produce the full frequency and dynamic range. You truly need the full 20Hz -20,000Hz audio range, and ideally, you should never have to turn your amps, processors, and mixers up to more than 50% of their power range. For karaoke bars and weddings you can cut corners. For hip-hop, rock, and top 40 music, the sound quality doesn’t really matter that much. For techno, the music is the sound quality.
Many people will mistake ‘loud’ for ‘good’, and they’ll turn a system up to try to make it sound ‘better’. What happens is that it will actually sound worse. The midrange speakers will stress and start sound shrill (when the snare hits and vocals start to shriek and distort), and the bass will start to sound headachey and hollow. Yes, the volume goes up, but the energy level actually goes down, because the physical limiting from the speakers loses even more of the spectral range. You know when a sound system is being stressed because at that point, you have to shout to be able to be heard by the person right next to you. Listening to a full, clean soundsystem, the bass frequencies can rattle your teeth but you can still talk to the person next to you, the vocals will sound like someone is singing or talking, not shouting at you, and your ears won’t ring the next day.
The sound that the venue provided for this show did not support the talent of the artists who performed. The volume levels were set right when Kristina was playing, but I watched someone (owner/promoter?) 15 minutes after Acid Circus came on turn the volume level up directly on the Xone:92 main out, and the music suffered for it the rest of the night. All the subbass frequencies disappeared, as that’s the first thing that happens when you push QSC and Mackie active speakers; the ‘smiley-face’ internal processing kicks in, and now you have what sounds like a big boombox. All sound is not created equal; you get what you pay for; don’t buy a wedding dress at Wal-mart.
Second, the lighting.
What lighting, you say? You have a group named “Acid Circus”, which is one of the most visually appealing names I’ve ever heard, a week before Halloween, and the visuals at the venue consisted of turning off all of the overhead lights except a single red lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. That’s a shame.
Having a cornerstone of the thriving Los Angeles techno scene come in and play like this is sort of like presenting someone gourmet food and fine wine on a paper plate and in a dirty styrofoam sippy cup. The actual quality of the food can be amazing, but the experience is not the same without the right presentation. Put the needle on the record!
And lastly, for any more than a few dozen people present at a show, please, for the love of God, invest in some Port-o-Johns outside. Two single restrooms inside are a huge irritant, and you can look at the line of annoyed and fidgety people who spend a half hour each time they have to use a restroom, waiting, drinks in their hands, and know that something is functionally wrong.
The Conclusion:
Overall, I had a great time. The booking was amazing, Kristina Childs and Acid Circus played fantastic music, and Jeromy Nail closed it down proper for the dance crowd.
My only comment is that if you want to create something special at an event, there has to be a lot more attention paid to details.
People can get so used to plastic sporks, they don’t know what else is out there; just wait until someone serves them with a silver spoon …
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Jukebox – October 15
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Review – Decibel Festival 2009
Overview:
It’s a task to try to review a whole festival, so I split this essay into tiny segments: tiny philosophies, tiny reviews, tiny soapboxes, tiny histories, etc. Thread them together for a tiny story.
Philosophy:
Music is the substance of birthdays, funerals, weddings, sports events and parties. It is the stuff of lullabies and taunts, the mist in dreams and nightmares. Deadly serious business, you know. That said, let’s keep things casual.
I operate with extreme bias, don’t worry. If I know you, it might make your music better or worse. Then again, it might not. If I like you, it might affect my enjoyment of your music. Or not. I might love something today and hate it tomorrow. I could want to die for something right now, and then fear it might kill me if I see it staring at me from across the street by the time I turn around. I’ll fight for something today, and rally against it tomorrow. You never know.
These things I say, they exist only now, in your head, and they are pointers for you to form your own understanding of the topics at hand. My purpose in this life is to spread the gospel, not to pretend to create it and hope that suckers believe me along the way. Listen for yourself, and always question.
Reset yourself for a breath. Why do you listen to music; and why do you go out? Do you do what makes you feel good. Body music, head music, drug music, sex music. All different functions. Check in, check out. How do you define yourself vs. your senses?
How do you chase moments, and how do you remember them? Virtual, immobile sensory snapshots? Four-dimensional experiences? What part of that moment do you want to be involved in? Do you feel safe or scared? Do you have your “I Love Us” group? Are you the leader? Do you affect things? Are you a follower? Do you agree with your people just because they tell you things? Do you agree with your people because they’d shun you out if you disagreed with them?
Where do you fit in the politics of dancing? Or do you even know?
All of these things make a difference. I’m just sayin’.
“I’m gonna play some different shit”.
Just relax. Reset yourself for a breath, just for a moment.
Introduction:
I’ve been excited about this year’s Decibel festival since last year. With great press and promotions both nationally and internationally, it was slated as one of the events not to miss in 2009, often mentioned beside events like Miami’s WMC and Detroit’s DEMF. And look – it’s in my back yard …
Also this year, some friends sponsored one of the showcases, and others from around the country were coming into town. Over time, my loosely-knit group of techno-philiacs has developed into a mobile clan of professional partiers; we do this for fun, we do this for a living, it’s our passion, our sacrifice, and our reason for getting up in the morning. Or more often than not, it’s our reason for staying up until that next morning comes.
Giddy-up.
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Review dB2009.r.1 :
Sweatbox afterhours @ The Electric Tea Garden,
Derek Plaslaiko:
Thursday September 24th, 2009
Thursday, opening day. Friends from Miami and Portland cruised into Seattle after midnight and it was time to go out, so we headed to the Electric Tea Garden for the Sweatbox afterhours. I hadn’t been to this venue since it was called something different, for a show that some friend put on several years ago.
Get to the entrance, listen to the bouncer’s little speech – “I’m here to help make sure everybody has a good time, and this venue stays open. No drinks down here, if you come outside, stay behind the cones… ” – Up the stairs, pay the cover, welcome to the show.
Nice venue: books on bookshelves, art on the walls, comfortable dance floor big enough to fit a happy 75 people, casual seating, good-sized bar, DJ at ground level. It’s about 2:30, pretty solid music playing, relaxed vibe, not too many but not too few people scattered through the bar area, lounge area, outside smoking, and dance floor.
We ran into Sean Horton, the Decibel Festival mastermind, right away. Chatted a bit, wandered around. Met some people from Denver, others from New York, outside smoking, making sure to stay behind the cones. Came back inside, ran into Josh and Agusta, settled into the music, and turned my brain on.
[Tiny Soapbox]: No matter what, performers should bring their A-game to a show. When it’s a show you have to pay for, and in this case, also show to help kick off a bigger event, you need to put a good quality stamp at the beginning. The first two DJ’s I saw, though they were playing a pretty good selection of tracks, did not suit their position.
The first DJ behind the decks looked distracted, tired, and uneasy, and was uncomfortable with his equipment. I don’t know if the turntables or needles were bad or his laptop/Traktor combo was giving him trouble, but there were volume and mixing issues his whole set. People there were having a good time with the music, but it was a struggle to try to overlook the technical errors and his stage presence.
The second DJ came on, and immediately when he started, the volume level jumped up like crazy, pushing people back from the front speakers and causing a bunch of us to move to the far end of the room and cover our ears. It took me several minutes of trying to get his attention by waving my hands in front of him until he looked up from he was doing to see me mouthing at him “turn the gain down”. Even after he nudged it down a little bit, the sound was distorted enough that it kept people off the dance floor. (This was when a medium-sized painting, in protest of the noise, fell on me, Josh and Agusta while we were hiding in the back of the room.)The second half of his set was musically better, getting into some rougher techno that had a good portion of the people who were still there bopping around.
[Tiny Soapbox]: There are two options inside Traktor software, ‘set auto-gain when loading track’ and ‘enable master limiter’. For live performances, do not enable them! DJ’s, use your ears, adjust your levels on a per track basis. The machine does not know better than you, and if you rely on computer-based auto-processing algorithms, there’s the chance it will make your audio out signal distort, and that distortion gets amplified through a big sound system. Also, if you are DJing in an area where you can be seen clearly and you spend more than 10% of your time staring at your computer screen, you are WRONG. Take opportunities to connect with your audience instead of pretending they aren’t there.
By 4:30-ish o’clock, I’d about had it. And then Derek Plaslaiko came on. Occasionally, I’m reminded why headliners are headliners. Within 30 seconds of coming on, he’d tamed the volume, set up a groovy little bassline, and everyone that was still at the venue was in front of the DJ. For the first time since I’d got there, there was a unified dance floor; arms were up, heads were down, feet were doing the shuffle. His second track was on the same vibe, and now we had a party. He hit a snafu near the beginning, playing something a little bit more experimental, and lost half the floor in a flicker, but did a quick mix in and got everybody back, and we stayed until the music stopped, sometime around 6. My favorite moment of his set happened right around 5am, when he pulled out a gnarly dark acid house track out of nowhere. So distinctive, so abrasive, so nicely placed in a room that was probably mostly full of techno-snobs at that point (really, who’s out at 5am for afterhours on a Thursday?).
After his set, I snapped a quick picture of him & Courtney and it was time to go home and sleep for a minute.
Thursday night and all is well. And away we go.
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Transition:
I got enough sleep to know that I was going to be functional for the next shows, then was up and running. There were some vague plans to see a film screening, but everyone was moving a little slow to get going that early. Jeff and Cynthia needed to start setting up at Sole Repair for their Al-Ga Rhythms/Latenight Renegades showcase, so by 5 o’clock we were headed to get artist and staff badges from The Chapel. We picked up what we needed to while Courtney had an entertaining back-and-forth with the nice people from Crane Hardware that had a display there.
Having a few spare hours until the tunes started, and while Cynthia and Courtney held the fort down at Sole Repair for a minute and Jeff ran to the airport, I took Emmy, our South Beach cohort, on a quick walking tour up and down Pike and Pine. It was her first time in Seattle, and a nice day to boot.
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Review dB2009.r.2 :
Alga-Rythms/Latenight Renegades/Fubar Showcase
@ Sole Repair
Pipedream, The Perfect Cyn, Dilo, [a]pendics.shuffle, Cascabel Gentz;
Dirty Dancing International @ Neumos,
Noah Pred, Rob Hood, The Wighnomy Brothers
Friday, September 25th, 2009
At 8 o’clock we were back at Sole Repair to see the start of Pipedream (Eric) & The Perfect Cyn’s (Cynthia Valenti) tag set, but it was very, very quiet, and I found out that they couldn’t turn the sound up until the restaurant attached to them was closed, or something to that effect.
I looked at the schedule of events again and did a quick double take. Noah Pred! In a half an hour? Across the street at Neumos?! Sweet. I told Emmy. She said “who?”
I found Thoughtless Music maybe three months ago when I was looking for new electronic music podcasts when I’d listened to the Resident Advisor ones a million times already. I followed the bread crumbs from there and found Noah, and his sets and productions are now some of my maintained go-to music when nothing else seems quite right.
I think Emmy and I were the first ones in at 8:30, and right away Noah’s live set was relaxed and calm with a deep house tempo, and the clean sound at Neumos was beautiful. Noah was using was using a controller of some sort, no turntables or decks. I recognized a few of the tunes, though I couldn’t name them. For an hour or so, we got to hear an excellent, danceable, melodic live set to start our evening out – you can’t ask for much more than that.
9:30 and I was back over to Sole Repair, talking with Ryan & Cristy, listening to the still-subdued but groovy tunes over there, trying a new apple cider beer. While I was upstairs relaxing on a couch with Courtney, I ran into Eva (Djane), who was the only one of the week-to-week central figures of Seattle electronic music culture that I saw during the festival. We had a nice conversation, and even had a little moment in the noise of the club. She told me that she’d recently been trying to organize, and that she’d written a list down of things she needed to make sure she didn’t forget, and that I was on there. Nice!
I consistently enjoyed the music that was playing while I was talking to people, but I wasn’t a huge fan of the physical setup at Sole Repair. You could watch the DJ’s from back and behind them if you were upstairs, or you could kind of see the top of their heads if you were in the back of the main dance floor below. The sound eventually got louder and cleaner as the night went on, the place was almost always full, the music spilled out nicely into the street outside, great vibe inside, good visuals; but I like being able to see what the performers are doing, and the layout there made that impossible.
I popped in and out of there several times between 10:30 and 1:30 for the collective efforts of [a]pendics.shuffle (Kenneth James Gibson), Dilo (Franco Di Lorenzo), and their combined group identity of Cascabel Gentz. The music was always good, and at times it was amazing. I wished that I had been a little more familiar with their tunes in advance in order to know more what to expect; but what I got was good damn techno. This was not boring minimal, standard tech house, or your mama’s powdered toast music; this was something deep and textured, touching on the fringes of what the potential for a live audio performance is. This is the next level thought and function; this is post-Guy Gerber, -Paul Ritch, -Sebo K. Wild-west techno farmer meets ironic and sarcastic Argentinean, anyone? The two of them dropped in over at the house for a bit after their showcase and before they headed to an afterhours at the Church of Bass, and Kenneth took a minute to check out Courtney’s mom’s cowboy hat while Dilo was talking about Phil Spector. Go figure.
Over at Neumos during those same hours I saw bits and pieces of Robert Hood and about half of the Wighnomy Brothers set. Hood was playing *destructive hard techno. He made me feel like I was being punished for daring to enter the room. The kids in the front ten rows were in such a spazy frenzy that they looked like they were having seizures. The only thing that kept me from appreciating the pure raw-vinyl techno-ness of it was Robert’s stage presence. It almost looked like he was aggravated to be there. He was technically great and played tracks that I have never heard and will probably never hear again in my life, but looked bored doing it, so after a few short spats of 10 or 20 minutes on his dance floor, I figured my Detroit techno experiences were complete for the night.
Now what can you say about the Wighnomy Brothers? Right after they to
k the stage, everybody was just plain happy. The two of them play incredibly good music, have fantastic stage presence, you get the feeling that they love performing, and that they love performing for you. They wander the stage, flipping through record bags, searching for whatever music comes to their minds, playing primarily vinyl (there was only one CD deck on stage; think about that), taking turns expertly beat-matching, shifting through sub-genre housey music, and working the mixer like they sleep with it under their pillows.
Upstairs on the balcony with the Vogels, and Ryan says, ‘yep, this is the best thing I’ve heard over here so far tonight’. Bring the tunes, bring the vibe, bring the party. That’s what the Wighnomy Brothers do. I imagine a lot of the people who were at that show will remember it as being the best performance of the festival. Someday I’d like to go to one of their shows where they get a full 3-hr time slot, and I’ll be in the front row elbowing people out of the way.
Everything shut down around 1:45am per standard, and everyone milled about outside for the next hour or so.
The next day was the day I was most looking forward to, so there was sleep on the horizon, and I passed on the afterhours show that night and the boat party the next day. This was one part of the festival where I was on my own; I was determined to see Nosaj Thing and Mary Anne Hobbs with a well-rested mind and body.
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Review dB2009.r.3:
Bass-lovers Unite @ Neumos
Nosaj Thing, Megasoid, Daedelus, Mary Anne Hobbs:
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
This was the showcase I was most looking forward to for a few different reasons. I’d never heard of Nosaj Thing (Jason Chung) before I saw him play one of the opening slots for The Glitch Mob in July. I was blown away by their performances that night, and wrote a review about it to share my experience. Soon after that show, I found out that Nosaj’s artist album “Drift” was voted by a Los Angeles publication as one of the best electronic music releases coming out of LA this past year. He’s the real thing. Great energy, great performances, and he’s got a unique sound; a truly innovative soundscape artist. So I definitely wanted to see him again.
And Mary Anne Hobbs, playing here in Seattle, for real?! The godmother and champion of the sketchily-described “West Coast rocks” sound – here to exorcise the demons. I’m there, up front and center.
Josh had been working sound and lights for some of the events already, but I convinced him that this was one he’d want to see and enjoy from inside the crowd. We found parking outside Neumos at 8:28 and were inside right when the music started.
Nosaj rocked it, and from the very beginning of the night, the dance floored filled up almost immediately; I recognized some of his set from his album, some of it from his last performance, and there was some new material, too. Fantastic sound at Neumos again, and it really brought out the quality of the music that Nosaj plays. It’s not easy to describe his sound; deep, down-tempo, mid-tempo, hip-hop beats with fuzzy electro basslines and techno sound washes. Crunchy crunchy crunchy, bob your head, hop up and down when the kicks hit. His show is a live performance, he works off a hardware controller of some sort; and you can tell his brain and the machines are one and the same. If you want to experience it, you have to be there.
Megasoid popped in next, but his introduction killed the vibe for me. “I usually have a bunch of gear behind me”, he said, “but my house got broken into, so I’ve just got my computer tonight”.
Hmm. Ok. Then he started with a looped J-Lo sample? So I went outside to cool off for a bit. I came back later into his set and it was good break-beaty stuff, but at that point I was on pause waiting for Mary Anne. I’ll look more into Megasoid’s music some other time.
What happened after him, though, was my favorite surprise of the festival. I’d heard of Daedelus before; he did some work with Busdriver, and I’ve run across a few references to him different places, but I never knew what he looked like or how he performed. He came on with his little lighted panel of buttons (I found out later it’s a monome) tilted toward the audience so we could see it, and put on one of the most artistically-inspired performances I’ve even seen a single person do. Later I read a review of him that called him “show-offy”. What else is a performer supposed to be? His look, his energy, his (practiced) motions, those aren’t for his own benefit, eh?
When I showed someone a video that I took of him, I got a slightly caustic “I call bullshit. He’s just pushing buttons”. Well, yeah, he is. But can you imagine the preparation? Organizing everything so that you can do a full performance ‘just pushing buttons’?
Part of Daedelus’s shtick is that he’s making what he’s doing transparent. People who use computer screens; you can’t tell what they’re doing with the mouse, keyboard and screen combo. But with Daedelus and his monome, every button he pushes means something. It’s an effect, a sample, a note, an on/off switch, a filter. Nothing happens without him pushing those buttons. Really, what is a piano player doing? Pushing buttons. A guitar player? Plucking strings. A DJ? Putting a needle on a record.
Sometimes to enjoy music, you really just have to let the artists take you with them. And Deadelus took the crowd at Neumos with him for his hour, pounding out tempo-locked madness of electronic chaos or continuity, whatever he chose at whatever moment he chose it. Sweet vocals, jazz riffs, synthy lead lines, guitar licks, distorted, heavy-rolling basslines; you name it, it was there. Energy goes up, energy goes down, energy goes sideways, bang bang growl whisper whistle grind, wash rinse repeat.
By the time his set was over, my brain was solidly in neutral, just allowing the music to roll over me and just enjoying it for what it was.
There was a quick break while they set the stage for Mary Anne, so a good chunk of the audience and me zombied our way out of the room for a minute.
A short while later, she was on a pair of CD decks and ready to go.
Her first few tracks missed any real mark. They felt disjointed and she looked a little uncomfortable, having a stagehand come adjust her deck-stand at one point. I was ready to just be happy that I could say that I saw her play live. But pretty soon she found a groove, and I think the sound in the room got tuned to its optimum volume right around then. I’ve had bass rattle my teeth, my hair, and even my eyeballs. But this, this was the first time I think bass has rattled my lungs. Whoa.
It’s been several years since I’ve felt a group-of-strangers-as-single-entity vibe. I used to catch it all the time at raves, but bars and clubs are different because people are talking, getting drinks, not focused on the music, etc. But there we were, about a half hour into her set, and everybody was paying attention, locked in.
I don’t view Mary Anne necessarily as a DJ. A far as I can tell, she beat-matched spot-on, but didn’t do extended mixes; they generally sat at 5-15 seconds, or she hit the breaks in the tracks to switch over. More than a DJ set, this night was a show-and-tell session. And she showed some intense, body-shaking tunes. Like the title of the night claimed, this was BASS music.
Hers was an hour of exposition, of giving a full house of kids in Seattle a taste of something bigger, something most likely outside of what they’ve experienced before. You could feel the dub, the 2-step and garage, the hardstyle, the reggae/ragga, the LA underground. It’s not dance music to me; it’s not really head music either. It’s a middle ground of emotionally purging and undecodable rhythm lines and bass for the pure, unapologetic sake of bass. It’s music that you have to just let be; welcome it as a stranger and say goodbye to it as a friend.
Before I’d left to go to the show that night, I’d listened to Mary Anne’s album “Wild Angels” and was only so-so about it. After hearing her play live, I went back and listened to it again, and it makes more sense. Parts of enjoyment are all about association; I embrace that.
I left Neumos at around 12:30, right after her set, happily spent for the evening, inspired and calmed. Ryan was still up in the otherwise quiet living-room back at the house, so I spent the next few hours playing some music for him that was going to be the highlight of my next day, and one of the highlights of my year, The Motherfucking Gaslamp Killer. YEEEEEEEE-AAAH!!
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Review dB2009.r.4:
Second Annual dB in the Park @ Volunteer Park:
Kilowatts, The Gaslamp Killer:
Sunday, September 26th, 2009
I rallied the troops to try to get us all to Volunteer Park as early as possible, waking up Josh with the promise that he wouldn’t want to miss this day; so he, Courtney, Emmy and I piled into the blue van and headed toward Cap Hill. We made it to the park at 2 o’clock.
Blue skies and sunshine, what a beautiful day for a wedding, eh Sean?!
We were sad that we missed Eddie’s early set; he played the first hour and a half of the day, but we got to hang out with his goofy and dressed-up self while we were there; dancing behind the stage when Kilowatts (Jamie Watts) was playing.
And Kilowatts, oh my. Working with a big, blocky piece of hardware (I’d like to find out what it was) through a full Dynacord speaker rig, it was a perfect set for the park. Thoughtful downtempo/ midtempo broken beats (his own productions?), I can’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I wish I could describe better the nuances of the music that people play; it feels thin to describe an hour of Kilowatt’s music in just a sentence or two, but it’s also hard to try to experience music and try to remember it all at the same time, particularly all the music that happens at a festival, and especially by the fourth day in. Over and over, I say to myself, I wish people were here to hear this and feel this. This is what it’s all about.
At the park, the Burner community was well-represented, complete with wandering dogs, hula hoops, and playa-dusted outfits. I can’t guess at the total number of people at the show there because everyone was so spread out, and people came and went, but it was a good crowd, complete with all ages, including photographically picturesque groups of families eating sandwiches on the hill.
For that first hour, I happily zoned out and danced in the not-quite-yet trampled grass in front of the stage.
The transition to the next act was a little jarring, the volume geeked, and the sound-quality from the laptops was poor compared to the warmth from the hardware Kilowatts was using; so it was break-time again, heading off to the closest place to eat, getting frustrated that it took an hour for them to make me a damn sandwich, and then running back to the park to catch the one, the only, MOTHERFUCKING GASLAMP KILLER! YEEEEEEE-AAAAAAAAH!
[Tiny History]: I have my writer friend Shilo Urban; she cracks me up and writes about music like no one else I know. So I make it a point to try to research her “10 DJ’s I Love this Week” every week. Soon after she moved to LA, there was nearly always a name on her list – The Motherfucking Gaslamp Killer. Whoa.
So I listened to his releases, his sets, the Low End Theory podcasts that featured him, watched his Youtube video clips. Everything I could get my hands, ears, or eyeballs on. For weeks. And for weeks, it just sounded like godawful racket. Seriously. I would play it for people, and most would look at me in horror and tell me to turn it off. Others would look at me with an eyebrow up or a scowl. “What the hell is this?” A few people sat down with me and listened through a whole set of “Hell and the Lake of Fire are Waiting for You”. Usually the one-word response was the same as mine – “whoa”.
But over these weeks, gradually, like colors and shapes coming into focus to make a three-dimensional picture, his music became some of my favorite to listen to. Total crashing chaos. Turntablism meets jungle meets acid rock, hip-hop, East-Indian melody lines, horror movie samples and whatever else because, well, why not?
To appreciate it, you have to have a laser-focus on every second of tone, and you have to let go of your expectations, simultaneously. It can feel like some one gave you a spoonful of ketchup, sour cream, and chocolate, with a piece of raw fish, and then kicked you in the kidney while you were chewing on it. You have to be able to seperate your senses.
It’s not music for the faint-hearted. These are combinations of sounds you would want to lock in a basement and forget about if you weren’t sure they were keeping a secret from you. You have to put your ears to the speakers and ride it out. If it owns you, you can run away and hide in your hidey-hole. If you own it, it’ll take you wherever you want to go.
Like anything worthwhile, you have to work at it. Feel free to temporarily sacrifice your comfort zone, and your reward will come crashing over your head like a tuba in quicksand.
Say to yourself, “Is this guy serious? It’s just music.”
For sure, it is. Just music.
A few people say I’m being fooled. Regardless, now it’s part of my own private LaLaLand. I can handle it. I even like it.
I’ve never heard anything like the GLK, and he was coming to my city to play in the park on a Sunday afternoon.
Maybe it’s just music.
But this, was going, to be, great.
He takes the stage and says: “Now I’m gonna play some different shit. So just sit back and breathe”.
I stayed from beginning to end; no breaks, my spot claimed. Heavy limiting saved my ears. I wanna be in that guy’s skull. No shit, dude, I talk to him every week. “He really is that weird”.
You can beat the drums, or you can reference your remote. Do it. Past 50 yards out, there could be a bowl of silence. Inside the circle, I was waiting, and my ear muscles were already flexed and ready; they wanted to hear the cracks and pops.
You Jimi, you quacking bassline, you bizarre panning, like eyes blinking. Are these real songs, or pretend? I can’t imagine what twisted minds come up with these minute:30 audio holes. Every time Emmy relaxed into it, you broke her brain again like an old chipped ruler.
You could spin it front to back or back to front. I just knew it was a way out for a minute. A way out and a way in. Change the past, change the future, save the world; send a video clip of this madman and they would outlaw handlebar moustaches. Trust me.
“Without your energy, I have none”. I love it. He meant it. Pockets of crowds lost in exhaustion, the front realm; who were any of us, jumping like beans with hot feet. It was grass and mud underfoot now, slidey and hiccupping into the holes in my shoes. It’s easy to know you’re not going to remember an hour and a half, the density of sound hitting hard, fast, unrecognizable, and the only way to follow, like black neon traffic lights in a snowstorm, was to follow the dance of the stage.
There was a grey slippy shirt and a pair of boots that walked by. Oh, I thought you might be here.
“You’re being fooled! I’m gonna go hang out at the van.”
This is my day, my hour.5, to take the vowels out of the word cacophony (and sometimes ‘y’). This is the temporary tattoo soundtrack of my life. Senseless, but instead of coming from just your two directions, it’s all sides, sleeping and awake. I’ve overused those words to describe it and are so retired. There’s no stress and no tension without the letter ‘s’.
This is not crying by yourself in a dark corner. This is taking a tiny crowbar to your chest and stripping away the crushing layers of depression, anxiety, and fury that have been building up, with no voice to soothe them away. This is taking a tiny sledgehammer to your brain to annihilate the plastic slime that the haters, liars, and users have been pouring over your body to try to assimilate you. This is what you want to fix yourself.
Or at least, it can be, if that’s what you’re looking for.
“The last time I did it like that when the sun was out, was a long time ago. Might have been Lollapalooza ’94 when I was fucking 12!”.
And then he closed the show with what I believe was an intrumental versions of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”. For real.
These formulas for expression; these rules and regulations; these formats and formants; we can still rhyme and sing lullabies from nonsense syllables. These fragments, when they come together, form something alien, something wonderful and abstractly creationist.
These are the sounds of a Killer.
You dig?
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Review dB2009.r.5:
Decibel Festival Finale @ Neumos; Time Exile, Alter Ego:
Sunday, September 26th, 2009
Dragged myself, totally spent, out for the last evening to see Alter Ego (Roman Flügel and Jörn Elling Wuttke). Crazy Larry said it was not to be missed. Tim Exile was on when we got there, but I didn’t get it, and I guess you had to see what he was doing to get the full experience. I was outside at the time, with someone who was deciding whether or not he wanted a polish sausage from across the street. That vote spent, time passed and there was a personnel change.
I didn’t really get the Reagenz either. The crowd was definitely thinner than the night before. The timing felt out of place, though the music was good, it didn’t feel remarkable. I was tired, though, and not up on my research of who they were, only that it was live, or at least there was gear on stage.
Alter Ego was a good show. The crowd was happy. The performance started a little slowly, but found a good volume and speed about 15 minutes in. I don’t know enough about their live shows to know how much of it was pre-done or what software/hardware combo they used. I was just wiped out. I found different places on the floor to listen, playing with different spots where the bass would kick harder or softer, dancing with the other crazy people on the floor for five or ten minutes at a time.
Courtney found a few people and we wandered together occasionally, inside and outside. I was interested in the music coming from Sole Repair across the way, but it looked packed like mad. I got the impression the more intimate environment over there was keeping that final round of frenzied music shoppers quite sold. Near closing, they played their defining track, “Rocker”, and then played a high-energy encore to a room full of the die-hards who had made it all the way to the end.
The night came to a bright conclusion, big sound and big lights; then Sean, on the mic, voice totally shot, wishing us all a good night.
Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Conclusion
Make no mistake, as a musician, I want to blow your mind. I want to make you feel something you’ve never felt before. I want to give you an experience that no one has ever given you. I want to twist your brain so far to the left that you couldn’t hit the ground falling if you tried. I want to dig into your psyche and pull out your emotions like wet worms from dry grass trapped in ice. I want to remove your version of reality and replace it with something shiny and new. And I want other artists to do the same for me.
I am a seeker. I get bored with the comfortable and the easy. If I’m not stretching and growing, I’m stagnating and withering. I won’t take away your blankey, your teddy bear, or your birthday. If you find twigs and yarn to make a basket for your eggs, I won’t stomp on it. But your nest is not for me.
The Old Miami in Detroit during DEMF; the rooftop at the Standard, Monday Night Social, both in LA; the now defunct Pawn Shop, The Freaky Tiki, Sunday School for Degenerates, in Miami; the Endup in San Francisco; Cielo in New York; the 2410 in Portland. These are some of the places I’ve been introduced to during the past few years, and I continue to seek more. They all have something extraordinary about them. They all push boundaries; they all reflect the passion of their promoters and artists. These are the collective pieces of my broken home.
Now, finally, Seattle had a place for me, if only for a few days. Did I mention this is the first Decibel Festival I’ve been to? Something has always prevented me from going, one way or another. But this year, we met head on, face to face and in HD Technicolor.
So thank you Decibel Festival. Thank you Sean, for your vision and your drive. Thank you Noah, Nosaj, Daedelus, Mary Anne, & GLK. Thank you, to all the other performers and the staff.
You have made a difference.
I wish you all a good night.
Just breathe.
Good Music vs. Weird Music
Good Music vs. Weird Music
Part 1: n case you missed it
So, expanding on the ideas in some the previous essay:
Music – is not necessarily good or bad because it’s weird or normal.
So, let’s talk about weird:
Music that is made up of intentionally abstract sounds, or made up of intentionally jarring rhythms, music that has no pattern, no form, or no structure. If the intent of the music is for you to *think that’s it’s weird; ie. “man, I’ve never heard anything like that – it’s so *weird.” And so on.
Some examples of Weird music; intentionally abstract music, some glitch house, some minimal or tech house, anything with changes in tempo or format that distract you from the music itself, hyper-unnatural or hyper-natural tones, expression, or if it’s beyond the capability of humans to enjoy (ie. so loud that it’s painful, or so quiet that it’s unhearable).
I think there is an important distinction here, though – majority rule does not make music weird or normal. If most people thought George Gershwin’s or Jimi Hendrix’s music was weird – they were still wrong; they just didn’t understand enough about music to make the distinction. Think about it. Just like majority doesn’t make food or fashion weird, the Mob can’t make music weird. Without knowing what the basic constructs of cooking, design, or music are, you don’t have a vote on those matters. Sorry. But you can always join the club. All you have to do is pay attention, observe and be able to back your opinion up, and you’re in. You don’t have to be an expert; you just need to know the agreed-upon basics. And within each field, in order to understand what those basics are, all you have to do is ask someone who knows. Easy, right?
On a little side note: and not just about Weird music, but about lots of Stuff: something to be cautious of –
If you enter into conversation with Someone-Who-Knows, and they don’t accept your questioning of where they got their information or why they believe what they do; if they don’t have concrete references, or push information on you that can’t be verified: these are the Demons of the Informational World. You might know them as Posers. And they’re sometimes hard to spot because they speak with authority and assertiveness, and lots of other people may believe them. Ultimately, though, you have to decipher who knows about music and who doesn’t. I’m not sure there is a clear path to do that, other than by constantly being suspicious on the information being put out.
You can trust facts as such: “The Black-Eyed Peas have the #1-selling song on iTunes right now”.
But you should be more dubious of people passing off their *opinions as fact: “The Black-Eyed Peas are good musicians”.
“What proof”, you should say, “do you have to back that up? High sales do *not make music good.”
So – you people who know about things, wake up and start talking! It’s the only way to counteract the damage that’s being done by people who *don’t know about things, but talk about them regardless.
Anyway.
So if you’re attracted to weird music just because it’s weird, or you don’t like it just because it’s weird – that’s up to you.
But, I reiterate – weirdness or not-weirdness does not make it good or bad automatically. If you embrace the musicality of weird music, it will both expand your brain and help you to appreciate why standard sounds are standard. Keep an open mind.
-Ryan Xristopher
Hearing is Believing 