6 posts tagged “concert”
I was surprised at the turnout. I mean, there was obviously some serious hype behind her epic new album, and there were feature articles about her in both of the Seattle altweeklies, but I wasn't expecting a sold-out, completely rapt crowd for a harp-wielding songstress with a voice like Olive Oyl. It's a voice you either love or hate, and usually you start out hating it before you love it. Last night's show demonstrated a new restraint though, and found her tempering her vocal quirks, using them to her advantage, rather than just letting them shine through unpolished.
Smog opened the show alone, with an acoustic guitar and that deep, haunting voice he's known for. It seemed like there was an extra depth to it that you don't always hear on record, and his long, drawn-out songs were mesmerizing in person.
But we didn't even know the meaning of drawn-out until Ms. Newsom took the stage, alone for the first few songs, then backed by a 5-piece band given the unenviable task of recreating dense orchestral arrangements with simple folk instruments. But they passed that test with flying colors. After her solo performance of a couple of highlights from her debut album, The Milk Eyed Mender, they proceeded to play through all 5 songs from Ys, in order, at their full lengths. It was surprisingly dynamic, with the accordionist perfectly filling the role of a string section, and guitars, banjos, drums, glockenspiel, and other instruments fleshing out the arrangements. Even the multi-voiced harmony that opens "Monkey & Bear" was flawless. "Cosmia" finished out the set, trailing off into a dramatic, blissed-out duet between harp and singing saw, peaking and then falling into silence as the last metallic scrapes rang out.
The audience response was incredible, between songs and after the main set. I've never heard a crowd resort so quickly to floor-stomping demands for an encore as I did last night. And thankfully, it was a short wait before she reappeared to play "Sadie," "Clam Crab Cockle Cowrie," and of course, "Peach Plum Pear," all unaccompanied.
I was on the wrong side of the stage, and only able to see her during the solo sections of the set, but I did manage to get half-decent footage of "Peach Plum Pear," which you should take a look at, if you're so inclined. If she hasn't already stopped in your city, make it a point to catch this tour.
We showed up pretty early, since we were afraid it might sell out, but it was a surprisingly thin crowd. Shame on you Seattle! You missed out, that's all I can say.
Truckasaurus opened the night with a set of Gameboy-powered electro backed with video footage of professional wrestling looped into a homoerotic montage. It's a gimmicky concept, white trash electronic music, equal parts IDM and PBR. But the tunes are strong enough to back it up, staying melodic and accessible without delving into parody.
Thavius took over, and the visuals were switched out for a DVD of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. His music was breakneck hip-hop, 808 beats pounded out in a doubletime flurry. It was good stuff, but the transitions were rough at best.
Caural continued things with some live MPC-pounding action, grinning ear-to-ear the whole time, layering crunchy hip-hop beats over mangled samples from sources familiar and obscure (the nod to the Zelda theme was particularly nice). He closed with a work-in-progress remix of "Only Shallow" by My Bloody Valentine.
I thought he would be a hard act to follow, but Daedelus was more than capable of taking the reins of this crowd. If you haven't heard him before, hismusic is a whirlwind pastiche of found sounds, splintered jazz breaks, pop music and film scores from the 60s and earlier, and hip hop from today. He plays with an experimental, custom built MIDI controller, a non-descript box with a 16x16 grid of light-up toggle buttons set up define loop points and rearrange structures on the fly. He gave a long, loud set that rarely dipped in intensity, using his controller box to get a physicality not usually associated with live electronic music.
This was only the 5th stop on their tour, so check your local listings to see if they'll bein your town soon. You shouldn't miss this one.
So, I was fortunate enough to see TV On The Radio for the second time this year, last night at their sold-out show at the Showbox. It could have been the third time, but I (wisely, in hindsight) decided to skip out on the Sasquatch music festival this year.
They're fantastic live. I don't know if much is made of this fact. Most of the hype surrounding them is based on the quality of their relatively new second album, Return to Cookie Mountain, but their live show lives up to any praise it may receive. For a band that relies so much on density, texture, and sonic detail, they manage to translate well on stage, without relying on the crutch of pre-recorded material; in fact, the only time their sampler was in use was on "I Was A Lover," as far as I could tell. If anything, I'd say the energy is kicked up a notch when they're on stage, Tunde's arms flailing while Kyp and David are furiously tremolo picking.
I think they were better this time around than they were a short 5 months ago. It felt tighter, more streamlined. It helps that I was actually familiar with the Cookie Mountain material, unlike at their previous show, but that seems like a minor difference. There was a tangible ferocity and focus to this show that their previous show almost had. Both shows were great, but if you had to choose, there'd be a clear winner.
Left the camera at home, silly us, so there are no photos to share this time. I'm sure there are some floating around on Flickr by now if you care about that sort of thing. It's a shame though, because we had a pretty clear view even though we were far off to the right side of the stage. I guess we'll have to remember next time...
But the crown jewel of Seattle's electronic music scene for the past three years has been the annual Decibel Festival. The festival draws acts from all over the world for 4 days of almost non-stop audio-visual onslaught, covering tons of subgenres and styles. This is the first year I've been able to attend, and I was also lucky enough to help out as a volunteer, along with Serene.
The festivities kicked off on Thursday night, at Neumo's, with a showcase for the Mexico-based Nortec Collective. I didn't stay for all of this showcase, but caught sets by Latinsizer and Panoptica. Panoptica's set was pretty great, building over the course of 45 minutes or so from dub-flavoured minimal techno to full on four-on-the-floor dance music. But it was a work night, and we had a long weekend ahead, so we packed it in early.
I left work a bit early on Friday, and we showed up for our volunteer shift in the lobby of the Broadway Performance Hall at 6:00. They had us working the merch table in the lobby, selling Decibel T-shirts, buttons, and guide books. Next to us was a table of records, CDs, and shirts from Ghostly International. Jeff, the label manager, wasrunning the table, and was good company between sets. We bumped into him occasionally later on, and were disappointed to learn he'd had to leave the festival early.
Since there were two of us at the table, we managed to sneak into theperformance hall one at a time, to check out bits of each set. We caught Deru and Thomas Fehlmann this way. Fehlmann was awesome, looking every bit like a middle-aged but still hip professor with his close-shaven head full of gray stubble, dancing on stage behind his laptop, against a giant projection in the background.
After our shift ended at 10, we hopped over to Neumo's for the Headfuk Showcase, where Telefon Tel Aviv was about to start. Although their second album disappointed me in comparison to their first, the live show totally satisfied. Without the distracting guest vocalists, the audience was free to focus on the music itself, which is complex, soulful, warm IDM, with plenty of stuttered drum machines and live keyboard playing.
But the real highlight this night was Apparat, a prolific German producer with a string of excellent albums and EPs available. His performance was flamboyant by electronic music standards, with arms swinging and head bobbing, The crowd that had been nodding their heads along with Telefon Tel Aviv started dancing right off the bat, and even a hardware failure in the middle of the set couldn't turn the crowd against him. A 10 minute break to swap out mixers and cables did nothing to dull our enthusiasm, but it seemed to make him feel he had something to prove, and the second half of the set was harder, and more intense.
Alex Smoke had the uneviable position of following this up, but his music was more dance-oriented, so we ended up heading over to the Shameless afterhours party, at the Mercury, a members-only goth club nearby. Since the Mercury is a private club, they still allow smoking indoors, and between that, the late hours, and the taste in music, we decided to call it a night and save our energy.
We didn't end up going out until late on Saturday, meaning we missed the Experimental Showcase. But we would've had to pay to get in anyways, since we only had the Club Pass. But we went out to the Baltic Room for the Future Jazz Showcase, and caught some of SunTzu Sound's DJ set and the beginning of 1Luv's live set. 1Luv is an 8-piece live soul band with three female vocalists, and they were soooo tight. They had the dancefloor packed instantly, with a blend of latin and soul sounds.
Next on the agenda was Subtle, a band that we'd seen a few months ago. Headed by Anticon Collective founders Doseone and Jel, Subtle is a six-piece band that bends genres into inventive new shapes, mixing twisted hip-hop with noisy pop and other sounds. Static was finishing up a really inspiring laptop set when we arrived, but sadly, he didn't have any CDs at the merch table. Subtle did, however, have copies of their new album (and major label debut! Holy shit!) For Hero: For Fool, which isn't out in stores yet. You can bet I snapped that right up...
Anyways, Subtle played up to their usual high standards, with Doseone engaging the crowd in oddball banter all night (including a hilarious story about a G-Unit belt he saw, as well as pondering whether Jeff and Tim Buckley's corpses could win a fight against Biggie Smalls' corpse).
On our way home, we stopped outside the afterhours party at Neumo's, but it was definitely to onnce oonce oriented for our tastes.
We had another volunteer shift at the Broadway Hall on Sunday afternoon, doing ticketing for the Optical and Ambient showcases, and again, we managed to slip in for a few minutes at a time. Ryoichi Kurokawa's audio-visual performance was inspiring, with dual projectors and music with a wide range of textures and dynamics. He would slip from glossy, minimal synth tones to harsh, intricate rhythms, with the gorgeous video mimicking every tonal shift.
Anton Zalaparta and Mokira played back-to-back sets of dense ambience accompanied by slowly shifting video manipulations, the blurry images mirroring the indistinct, distant sounds coming from their laptops. Following this up was the audio-visual duo the Dead Texan, with swelling, pulsing drones and found sounds cueing spatial divisions and wipes in the video. Hard to descirbe without seeing it, really. Our shift was over by the time Murcof was on, so we caught almost all of his set, which was brilliant, mixing processed instrumental recordings and electronic textures into a soup of cinematic sound that balanced subtlety with muted bombast, against a backdrop of slowly crossfading, aged, underexposed film clips.
The last showcase of the festival was at Neumo's, and we showed up for the end of Greg Skidmore's DJ set. Greg is one of the organizers of the aforementioned Oscillate weekly at the Baltic Room, and he spun a set of hard-hitting IDM, an excellent warm-up for the penultimate set of the festival, by reclusive old-schooler Bola. Not to say that his music was old-school, quite the contrary. If anything, it sounded like Autechre might sound now if they hadn't departed from recognizable musical structres for abstract realms on Confield. Same starting point, leading to a different realm of possibilities. Hidden in the corner of Neumo's stage and dwarfed by three giant projections, he made great use of the full frequency range of the giant sound system.
The final set came courtesy of Speedy J, drum n' bass maestro and techno gadfly. His set started with nothing but pounding filtered drums, slowly peeling away layers to reveal more detail and nuance to the sound, and adding in new elements right when it seemed the volume and density had peaked. This was dance music at it's rawest, stripped to bare essentials and pushed to it's absolute theoretical limits. Simple, but not in any way minimal. Sadly, I had to call it a night (Serene had turned in before Bola took the stage), and made my way home, totally overwhelmed yet fulfilled by the entire weekend.
For any Seattlites who missed out, there's a last Decibel bash at Neumo's on Thursday, featuring minimal techno king Jan Jelinek (AKA Farben). Oo, there's always next year. See you there?
That ain't a typo, it's past tense.
Just got back from Bumbershoot, where A Tribe Called Quest rocked us through to the end of the festival. This weekend has been filled with music, friends, energy drinks, walking, cabbing, bussing, bad eating habits, heat, and more. And it's been awesome. The four day weekend is over, which means I damn well better get to sleep soon, because it's back to the scanner tomorrow morning at 9. Rural America needs to get it's newspapers online, bitches.
Tonight, From Monument to Masses plays at El Corazon in Seattle, just over the freeway and down the hill from our apartment. I've seen this band numerous times (and even opened for them once), and they're consistently one of my favorite live acts. They're a three-piece that utilizes guitar (plus a loop sampler), bass, keyboards, drums, drum machine, synth, and sampled spoken word elements to create a dynamic, politically charged brand of post-hardcore that doesn't eschew melodicism like some of their peers. The occasional unamplified (shouted) vocal parts add to the revolutionary air about them.
If you've never heard them, their second album, "The Impossible Leap In One Hundred Simple Steps" is the best starting point. It's stronger and more cohesive than their out-of-print self-titled debut, and more representative than the recent remix collection "Schools of Though Contend." If blistering, virtuosic math rock with a higher purpose is your thing, this is the band for you.
I submitted a remix for the remix album, but unfortunately it didn't make the final cut. I can see why. I was on a deadline, and started down two different paths with the remix, and ended up ham-fistedly combining the two approaches midway through. It was OK, but I feel like I could've done better with more time. Nonetheless, the remix was released on a compliation in support of Bindlestiff Studios, a Filipino performing arts center in San Francisco's Mission District. On the CD, it's credited as the Airliner remix, even though I am now Miniature Airlines. Here it is:
And here's the album, for reference's sake:
My Groups
-
Ambient Updated: 3 days ago
-
IDM - Music for your Mind Updated: 3 days ago
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
