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Ryan Xristopher’s Tiny Jukebox – October 15
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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.
Hearing is Believing 