3 posts tagged “festival”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.