Marc Maron

Neptune Theatre

Seattle, WA

11.25.11

So you’re probably thinking, “Jesus Christ, Devon. What the fuck?  This goddamn show was, like, two months ago. What the hell took so long?”  I know.  I understand.  I’m a little upset about it all myself.  But here’s the thing, see… it’s Marc Maron.  I love the guy, I really do, but sometimes he can be a little rough for me.  Not him or his material per se, but the thing is that, when I talk about Marc Maron, or when I think about Marc Maron, I can’t help but think about myself.  I can’t help but think about how I think about myself, how much I do, and why and when.  Once I start getting into self-examination like that, well, it can get a little overwhelming, and it can get a little paralyzing.  But at the end of it all, it’s why I love Marc Maron.  It’s why I’ve listened to all two-hundred forty-something episodes of his podcast.  It’s why I bought all four of his stand-up records, and why I’ve read his book more than once.  It’s why I snagged a ticket to 2010’s Bumbershoot festival, just so that I could see a live taping of his podcast.  It’s all because I know that I should look inside myself – I want to and I feel like I’m ready to- and it’s not something that I was ever compelled to do before I got into this one stand-up comedian.

Marc Maron has been doing stand-up for over twenty-five years.  He’s been on my radar since junior high, back when I’d come home from school and watch whatever was on the then-nascent Comedy Central.  Every day I’d listen to In Utero, drink Dr. Pepper, and watch clips of stand-up comedians on Stand-Up Stand-Up and Short Attention Span Theater, a clip-show that Maron briefly hosted in the early ‘90s.  For years after that, I’d occasionally flip by Marc Maron’s half-hour Comedy Central specials on television, and his name always popped up in conversations I’d have with my other comedy-nerd friends – one of whom would make a point to see him on his unbelievably frequent appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien (the comedian has performed over forty times on the show).  Marc co-hosted Morning Sedition on the defunct left-wing talk-radio station Air America and I can still remember a close friend telling me that the only way that he could listen to the show was to get up in the middle of the night and stream the East-Coast feed over the internet.  It was something he did as often as he could.

When he was coming up in the 80s and 90s, Marc was part of the Alternative Comedy movement.  His shtick wasn’t about sport coats or “Do you ever notice?” Seinfeldian musings.  Maron turned his comedy inward.  He was unique because when he got up on stage he talked about things that happened in his life; the same painful and self-critical things that exist in your own life, but that you probably didn’t even talk about with your own friends.  It could get a little uncomfortable now and again, but it was always smart and always personal, even if it did hit upon rage and regret.  The genius of all of it was that it wasn’t until the bits ended that you realized they were bits in the first place.  They weren’t just stories or confessions like you thought, but they actually had structure and they actually had beats and punchlines, subtle though they were.  Nothing seemed forced or egregious, it just seemed natural and intimate.  You laughed because you “got it.”  Maybe you were the same way.  Maybe you yelled at someone like that or maybe you doubted yourself the same way.  Maybe those same voices in your head tore you down the same way that they did Maron.  Marc’s honesty onstage was what drew you to him, and it’s something that you had to be ready for.

During the late 2000s, Marc Maron was at a crossroads.  It’s something that he’s often talked about in interviews and on podcasts, but to put it bluntly, his career was at a standstill.  The radio gigs were up.  The clubs were half-full.  He’d been doing this for how long?  He was how old?  His 2009 double-disc album, Final Engagement (recorded in Seattle at the “renowned” Giggles comedy club) isn’t necessarily a depressing experience, but it most definitely isn’t an uplifting one.  The comic veteran’s exasperation and frustration is on full display – he opens the record by referring to himself as a “marginalized act” and goes onto voice every concern about his future and faltering career to the audience.  He says that people leave his shows saying one of two things: either, “That guy’s hilarious” or “I hope he’s okay.”  It’s clear that something had to happen, and that something turned out to be WTF.

WTF is Marc Maron’s podcast, one that he started in September 2009.  It’s early days were like this: Marc and a comedian friend sat down and talked for an hour.  That was it.  It started with some rants from the host talking into a microphone about his day, his insecurities, and his rage.  From there he would swap road stories and career tales with a fellow comedian – maybe someone like Dave Attell or Kyle Kinane.  I first heard about WTF a few months after it hit iTunes.  I’d been heavily into podcasts for a few years and I was definitely interested in something new, especially something with comedians riffing and complaining.  There were three months of WTF episodes available in the iTunes store and, as soon as I listened to Episode One, I knew that I’d found something goooood.  It was like I’d suddenly stumbled onto a new group of friends; a group of clever guys reminiscing about their careers and deconstructing the art of stand-up comedy.  I felt like I had a real connection with Maron, something that I hadn’t really felt throughout all of that time that I’d been watching him on television.  On the podcast, he was even more open about his own life, so much so that it made me feel like I should be too.  I could relate.  He made me – just some chump listener – feel like he was a friend.  I couldn’t stop smiling when he talked about something mundane, like how upset and embarrassed he was after he bought those boots that didn’t fit and then, how he felt like they were forever taunting him from the closet.  I’d felt the same way about a handful of awful shirts that hung in my own closet.  When he talked about loneliness with another stand-up I felt a certain kinship because I had those exact feelings too.  And, even while I couldn’t relate to his stories about blowing up at a colleague or being a callow youth, there was an energy and a confidence in his voice during every story that made me feel like it was alright to open up about your mistakes and missteps.  Sometimes Maron and his guest would get on a jag laughing about ‘80s stand-ups that I remembered watching on Comic Strip Live and I ached to be part of the conversation.  During his on-air eulogy for Greg Giraldo – a stand-up who died of a prescription drug overdose in September 2010 - I heard Marc’s heartfelt sobbing and hurt and I nearly broke down myself.  Months later, when comedian Greg Fitzsimmons was a guest, I came close to tears again; only this time it was because of how infectious and joyful it was to hear two friends – two guys who had come up together in the Boston comedy scene, decades ago – joke, laugh, and rib each other the same way that we all do with every one of our close friends.  The purity and sincerity was undeniable and it was made all the more poignant because it felt like an ordinary green room hang-out session and not an episode of one of the number one-rated podcasts on iTunes.

So, anyway… now Marc was coming to the Neptune Theater.  I knew that I’d be there.  I couldn’t not be.  But, as excited as I was for the show and to see one of the few comedians that I felt like I understood and related to, I was nervous.  This was partly because it was Marc’s first solo theater show – his first time out of the clubs – and I felt a little nervous the way that you would for any friend who’s taking a big step forward.  But mostly, I was worried, because I knew that I’d be in the Neptune alongside hundreds of people who felt the same way about Marc that I did.  Hundreds of us would be sitting side-by-side and it scared me to think that this very show could mean the end of the illusion that I, and I alone, had a truly personal connection to Marc Maron.  It scared me a little to think that Maron wouldn’t be mine.

I worried about who would be there and how this would affect my enjoyment of the show.  I had seen Marc Maron perform at a suburban comedy club about a year earlier.  There was a two-drink minimum and the feature act was a middle-aged Texan woman who did thirty minutes about how her boobs sagged and how her teenage daughter had a nose ring.  What I remember the most about that night wasn’t so much that I sat at the lip of the stage or that Maron looked me right in the eye as he ranted about his notebooks and his cats, but that the crowd wasn’t “hip.”  I remember looking around the club and noticing how many people – middle-aged and “regular” people – came out, not because they wanted to see “Marc Maron,” but because they wanted to see “comedy.”  It fell on a Friday night and it was just something to do.

But now, I thought, we were just one year later and within that time WTF had exploded.  Marc had been profiled in the New York Times and the Onion AV Club.  His show had pulled high profile guests like Gallagher (who stormed off the show) and Robin Williams, Ira Glass and Brian Cranston.  And we were in Seattle.  Would there be a theater full of mustaches and skinny jeans?  I was nervous that the person sitting next to me, the person sitting behind me, and the people sitting seven rows back would all be WTF-ers too, that they’d too know every detail about Maron’s life and had brought cookies and clever t-shirts for him.  Most importantly, I was worried that there might be a collective sense of over-enthusiasm at this show and that it would weaken the connection that I felt I had with Marc, that I would be forced to confront the fact that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Before the show, I wondered what it  was that Marc would talk about.  Would he have a new act?  How new?  How much would I know from the podcast?  He just tweeted about shaving his mustache, I wondered if he’d have facial hair.  I wondered if his girlfriend was there.  I wondered if he’d talk about his cats Boomer or LaFawnda.  I thought about that story that I’d recently heard on WTF about the raccoon that died under his house and whether or not that would turn out to be part of his act.  I started feeling like I knew too much about Marc Maron.

At 9:30 it was time.  We’d already heard a little AC/DC canned music pumped over the speakers and we’d seen the opening act.  This was it.  Maron walked out onstage.  He wore black boots and had a 5 o’clock shadow.  The facial hair was on its way back.  He wore a blazer.  He wore Levi’s.  They were just like mine.

He opened his set by talking about the poster advertising this show.  It was an homage to a famous Lenny Bruce poster, from when the legendary comedian had performed at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium.  Maron stood onstage comedy-nerding out about it, how flattered he was that someone had put him in such company, and also about how scared he now was that he’d have to try and live up to that mythology and legacy.  Marc segued into a line about his own relationship with his audience and how his tendency is to harangue everyone in some sort of unconscious effort to push them away, pull them back, and then push them away again.

Maron talked about the Occupy Wall Street movement and read a snarky and accusatory email that he sent to his cousin, a high-class stockbroker that he hadn’t seen since they were adolescents, jamming on a Rolling Stones tune in a relative’s basement.  Marc talked about his girlfriend and, in what was probably the most telling moment of this evening, he didn’t say, “My girlfriend and I” but rather, “Jessica and I.”  He stood on stage, called her by name, and immediately followed that with an acknowledgement that, yeah… we all knew who “Jessica” was.  We knew all about her and their relationship from the podcast.  It was that one tossed-off line, “You all know Jessica” that meant a lot to me and seemed to sum up, not only the entire evening, but also where Maron is right now in his career and in his life.  It was right then that everyone in the theater unconsciously realized that, when it came to Marc Maron (and especially to the post-WTF Marc Maron) that we all had a relationship with one other and with the man with the microphone standing before us.  Even if we’d never met, we were somehow still pretend-friends.  It was almost as if this one phrase had let us all know that there was no longer the same fourth-wall barrier between performer and fan.  We all agreed, in one way or another, that we were there because we had something in common and because we had this weird affection for and intimacy with one another.  Maron recognized this and it was at that moment that I realized that there really was unique energy and comfort in the air.

Most of the other bits I knew from the podcasts, and some I recalled from previous performances or from Maron’s most recent album, 2011’s This Has to Be Funny (recently named Record of the Year by Laughspin.com), but it was never a let-down or a retread to hear them again.  In fact, it was even more interesting to see these routines onstage.  On the podcast they were stories, but in seeing and hearing them told again to a sold-out audience, you couldn’t help but notice how they had progressed into becoming fully-formed pieces of his routine.  I think that we’d all come to this show because we were comedy nerds, and because we loved the craft and the craftsman.  Seeing Maron trim the fat off of the stories that I’d already heard (and that nearly all of us had already heard) about his near-death experience on an airplane or about masturbating in his hotel room was fascinating because I knew that he would do those same routines at every show – maybe up to 6 times in a weekend – and that each time it would sound the same and each time it would feel the same to everyone in the audience.  And, by saying it would feel the same, I mean that it would sound like the story was that spontaneous every time, and that it was new and exciting.  When Maron joked about how he thought that he honestly might die when his plane hit that turbulent patch and about how his moments in his life flashed before his eyes, he spoke in a way that had all of the energy of something that only happened yesterday, instead of months ago.  It’s all so natural and yet, we all knew that it was practiced and refined.  It was all incredible to watch, because it showed me his growth as an artist and a performer.  Maron suddenly seemed like more than just a comedian, he was a bonafide storyteller and monologist.  Even in the space of one year, from the time I’d seen him perform at that suburban club last February, I could see how much better he was, even at just talking.  He was comfortable and engaging in a way that he hadn’t been before.  He wasn’t a man trying to win anyone over or take control; he was a man holding court over a group of friends and acquaintances.

Throughout his set, Marc worked through a bunch of his new material.  He’d occasionally pull out a scratchpad that he’d penciled-up backstage and talked through what new bits he liked.  He tried out something about how he was trying to work out a bit about heel inserts.  He continued this way, talking through thoughts that he’d had and notes he’d scribbled on a napkin.  He talked about how ridiculous it was that he’d decided to vacation in Seattle in November.  He hit upon some standard Seattle tropes like coffee and rain.  He affectionately called us “wine-drunk Earth-nerds” and lampooned our aversion to umbrellas.  The comedian talked about his Thanksgiving dinner at a vegetarian restaurant (“Nothing is more exclusionary than large groups of people having a good time”) and his trip to the EMP rock and roll/science fiction museum (where all he could think was, “What is this place? A room of Kurt Cobain, a room of Jimi Hendrix, and then whatever the hell else we could think of? A room about Avatar? Sure! Why not?”).  He launched into something he calls his “honest mic check,” a routine where he alternates, “Check…check..one…two” with lines like, “I disappointed my parents” and “Bad career choice, dreams fading.”

Somewhere around halfway through the evening, Maron began to do some of his older stand-up material. He even introduced these old bits by saying, “I like to do some of my older material at these shows, because a lot of people just know me from What the Fuck.”  This was honestly some of my favorite material from the set, and not because it was necessarily better or more touching, but because they were all moments when I could truly see Maron act and perform.  They were more practiced and a little more conventional than the material that had popped up earlier in his set.  He’d been doing some of them for years but, instead of being stale, they were infused with an enthusiasm that came from his excitement about recreating his former self.  His stories about his drug addiction turning into ice cream addiction, or about being put in the outfield during Little League weren’t just routines tailor-made for theater-sized crowds, or routines that were hilarious regardless of how funny you found Marc Maron (or if you found him funny at all).  They were routines that harkened back to the angry, pacing Marc of yesteryear, rather than the -as he put it- more contemplative and sedentary Marc that we knew today.  Seeing him exaggerate and pace the stage like his younger self and watching him gesticulate and raise his voice gave me an entirely new appreciation for him as an artist and I respected it, both as a performance, in and of itself, and because it showed me a sense of Maron’s own self-reflection and the growing sense that he had about his own legacy and individual place in comedy.

He brought up Jessica again and discussed the details about when and how they first met (again referencing, with a smile, how he was sure that we all knew the story already).  He explained how she was a fan who hooked up with him at a Portland comedy festival and, not long thereafter, moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles (but, “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not a stalker”).  From there, he detailed their tumultuous courtship, how his Blackberry would get alternate picture messages from Jessica (of her vagina) and then from his carpenter (of a custom-made bookcase).  “And I gotta be honest, I was a little more excited about the bookcase.  I’m not afraid to put things in that.”  Maron closed out the bit by talking about a particularly gnarly screaming match that they’d had, in which a frightened neighbor had come to the door and pleaded with them to stop arguing.  It was that night when they first said “I love you.”

But in spite of everything that I’ve written here, in spite of the times that I used the words “rage” or “anger,” I really want to emphasize that Marc Maron never got truly dark or truly angry.  The descriptors of those emotions came through as parts of his stories and as major themes of his act, but real and true misery never once came through in his attitude or mannerisms.  Throughout the evening there was never anything but a feeling of warmth and togetherness, both in the crowd and onstage.  It seemed like even when what I was hearing were stories about shouting at girlfriends, having no one to turn to, or being forty-four years old and still jerking off in the living room, the way in which I heard them was one in which there was still hope and where things would always get better.  Marc Maron’s tone suggested that while it’s true that we can all become angry and insecure, life really isn’t much more than a comedy of errors and maybe if we take a chance and lay everything on everyone all the time we might just get some love back.  Maybe we’ll find ourselves with the love and respect that we always wanted.  It’s worked for him and it’s what we experienced there that night.  Marc Maron is just like every one of us that was there in the audience, even when there are times that we don’t want to admit it to ourselves.  We’re all prone to frustration, anger, and insecurity, and seeing Maron transform those feelings into something and to come out the other side was both refreshing and inspiring.  I didn’t come to see him for an escape, I came because I wanted to learn something about myself and I wanted to grow as a man and as a human being.  I came because I wanted to laugh at the joy that I’m connected to someone else and, on that night, connected to everyone else.  As much as we know that each of our internal monologues are idiosyncratic and unique, there’s a whole lot of people out there who are just like us and, on that night, I felt like we were all together and that we needn’t worry because, as long as we keep at it, we just might get it all under control.

Having grown up in Orange County, CA, Karl linked up with DJ Greyboy in San Diego and the duo began fusing together acid jazz grooves and beats.  By 1995, the project had acquired guitarist Elgin Park (aka Michael Andrews), organist/keyboardist Robert Walter, bassist Chris Stillwell, and drummer Zak Najor.  This marked the birth of the now-legendary Greyboy Allstars, as well as their classic album, West Coast Boogaloo (feat. Fred Wesley).

Always prolific and ever evolving, Karl thrived in several more projects, began fronting Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, and has continuously popped up and found homes with everybody and anybody in the jamband circuit over the years.  His resume is a mile long and, most recently, he’s performed with the likes of such acts as Slightly Stoopid and none other than PUBLIC ENEMY!  Every great festival that I’ve been to has included some incarnation of Karl Denson; whether it’s a late night, post-Phish Halloween show, KDTU set, or just the saxophonist jamming with a seemingly unlikely bluegrass band – he is up to his eyeballs in music!  Through it all, one of the most impressive things about this man is the balance that he maintains between heavy touring and being a father/husband.  He specifically structures his tours to maintain this balance and one can tell from being in his presence that he truly knows how to keep all of his passions equally in check.

Once I heard that Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe was going to be covering the Rolling Stones album, Sticky Fingers in it’s entirety, with additional guitar work by New Orleans slide-guitar extraordinaire, Anders Osborne , I knew that Seattle and the rest of the cities on this tour were in for a treat.  Not only did the band absolutely tear apart the Stones album with deep heart and soul, but the KDTU second set revealed the ever evolving nature of Karl’s own music.  The show was incredible and we even got the rare opportunity to ask Denson a few questions between sets.

-Joel Ott

JOEL OTT: So how’s the tour going?

KARL DENSON: We’re having a great time… It’s going really well, the crowds are loving it.  It’s a great record, you know, it’s fun to play.

JO: How did you choose Sticky Fingers? I mean the Stones have a lot of material…

KD: We were just kind of- we started with Aqualung.  We were gonna do Jethro Tull.  And then we thought, “you know what? A lotta people aren’t gonna know that record… like, really well” .  So, we said, “Ok, let’s go with the Stones” and then, we just started going through all their records and that (Sticky Fingers) had a bunch of tunes that I really liked… You know, “Sway”; I’ve always loved that track.  And then we’d already done ‘Can’t you hear me knocking,” you know, a year ago, and it just seemed like the right one.

JO: Well, it definitely works!

KD: We’re having fun

JO: Anders?  How did that all come about?

KD: We needed somebody to play slide… You know, we needed a slide guy and somebody who could sing, to share the vocal duty.  And he and I have been trying to do stuff together; we sat in on each other’s gigs a couple times in the last couple years, so this is like our first chance to really do something together, so… he was kind of a natural choice.

JO: Brian Jordan has been with the Tiny Universe for quite a while – what happened to him?

KD: He decided he wanted to do his own thing.  And you know, I think with our schedule being kind of broken, as it is-  You know, like I did a lot of this summer with Slightly Stoopid, so we kinda had some nice big breaks in the schedule… I think it gave him enough momentum on his own where he was like,”I think I should stick with my thing.“  So, he’s just doing his thing… and DJ Waynes was a natural choice; we’ve played with him a few times and I’ve always wanted to play with him.  You know, like he sits in and ALWAYS impressed, so it’s kind of a cool thing.

JO: You’ve mentioned before how, early on in Grey Boy Allstars, you’d put ideas out or people would put ideas out there (in the context of grey boy) and they either liked it or not, but it was like real straight and to the point -

KD: With the All Stars? Haha, yeah they’re the style council.

JO: So I was wondering how that’s affected your growth and development.

KD: You know what, it was a really good opportunity and still is; we still do things together.  It’s a great sounding board from the standpoint of… really, kind of fleshing out ideas AND knowing when it’s cool or not.   Sometimes there’s things that you do that might work for this band (but) they don’t work for the All Stars, or there are some things that are just like,”that’s a great idea, but not necessarily applicable to my audience.“  So, that’s the cool thing about having those guys around – they just refuse to play anything.

AMY SALVADENA (recording the interview): Brutally honest?

KD: They refuse to play anything they don’t like. They’ll actually, you can force them to do it, but they’ll realize – this isn’t going to work *laughs*.

JO: You were talking about Jam Cruise and how it gets better and better every year, but you don’t want to have any expectations (“I don’t want to say it’s gonna be better next year, but the way it’s been going…”,) so I was wondering about expectations.  I try not to have expectations myself, because I feel like it sets you up for disappointment, or whatever, and I think it’s a good way to go through life. So, I’m wondering; does that point of view apply at all to your music career or your life?

KD: You know, to a certain extent.  I’m not one to go into a situation and create… I don’t create situations I’m normally one to go in and see what it is and then, you know, try to make the best of it.  I do find that people that have lots of expectations tend to get disappointed and then bum everyone else out around them, so I think it’s a more healthy way to look at life and kind of keep it fresh.  You can have expectations, I think it’s just, you know, there’s that choice of whether or not to be happy.  Along with that, you know people that make a lot of expectations tend to allow themselves to be unhappy when their expectations are let down and I disagree with that philosophically.

JO: Jazz, I want to talk about jazz…when you started playing, it was early on… I mean, how do you feel like jazz was then, how is jazz now, and how does that relate to the whole jam band scene, which has sort of evolved into this big thing now…

KD: You know what, I’ve always been a jazz head, but I think there was a point where I realized that what I really liked about jazz was its connection to dance music… And so, I tend to stay on that path.

*loud laughing in background, we all laugh*

I think that’s led me away from jazz, traditional jazz to a certain extent, where I think that spirit of what it was when it started in New Orleans is maybe more applicable to hip hop right now, than it is to trad(itional) jazz.  You know, I liked John Coltrane as a kid, so I listened to a lot of avante garde jazz and I thought that’s what I wanted to do for a long time.  And so, as a result, it kept me open to a lot of things… and, so what jazz is; I really think it’s a spirit, not a style of music… And, you know, I look at cats like MMW (and) to me is like, I like what they do- I mean, in terms of being jazzy.  And I like what Roy Hargrove does… but, I don’t like the purest element that doesn’t allow for new thought.

JO: What about the connection with jambands?

KD: Well, I think the jamband scene is a scene that’s all about improvisation, which I think very closely connects it to the jazz scene.  I used to always say that I thought High Sierra (music festival) was one of the best jazz festivals of the year, because you would find that bands like MMW would be there, or Skerik would be there, and, you know, all these weird projects… Bela Fleck would be there, Jacob Fred Jazz Odysey would end up there, and it’s all this weird music.  And then, you have a bunch of blues artists and soul artists and bluegrass artists… Bluegrass – to me – is jazzy; it’s all about improvisation.  So, I think the jamband scene -for me- is a natural place to be, in terms of playing jazz music.

JO: Jamcruise.  Convince us.  I mean  -it sounds awesome- tell us why we should go.

KD: Well, I mean… you’re on a boat!

*we all laugh*

You’ve got all the bands you like on a boat.  You’re stuck on a boat with a bunch of bands and it’s pretty amazing and I think that one thing that Jamcruise has done that nobody else does to this extent, is we created the “jam room”.  The after hours jams that go on in the jam room are pretty epic, because you’ve got, you know, 20 bands on a boat, they’re stuck out there.  After everything’s done and it’s 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning, everybody heads to the jam room, and everybody goes on stage and just plays – and it’s pretty insane.  So, I think it’s a really good party, and it’s on a boat!

Our interview was then cut short, because Karl had to return to the stage for a set of KDTU material.  One didn’t really know what to expect after such a powerful cover of the entire Sticky Fingers album.

Anyone familiar with The Stones release would naturally anticipate a stretched-out sax jam towards the end of the classic, “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and, though they ran through it really well, the jam didn’t stray too far from the original.  What really took me by surprise though, was the next track, “You Gotta Move,” which featured extended slide-guitar work by Anders Osborne over the rest of the band (we’re talking about a full horn section, keys, another guitar, and drums).  At some point, I remember turning to my friend and saying something like, “Wow, this DEFINITELY does not sound exactly like the album.”  Sure enough, upon checking later, the band had taken a two-minute blues tune and jammed the hell out of it with emotion and power, for a screaming seven minutes!  The other truly noteworthy jam, most unexpectedly, popped out of “Sister Morphine”, which is a really slow and mellow song, as the title would imply.  As soon as the lyrics were “out of the way,” the drums kicked into double-time and, all of a sudden, the room was in a funk-infused, trancey dance party that lasted around ten minutes longer than the album version.  We were getting a taste of exactly what solar system the Tiny Universe is jamming in these days.  Of course, they also nailed the classics: “Brown Sugar”, “Wild Horses” and “Dead Flowers”.

I’ve seen Karl many times and, although I’m not familiar enough with his material to really get into the names of the songs, I know that I can always count on a couple of things: the music always sounds fresh and I am always gonna dance my ass off.  This second set was no exception.  While they ran through some of their more composed material, they didn’t waste a lot of time before getting right back into that realm “Sister Morphine” had brought us to, and we had a full on dance party for the entire set.  There was a “synthy” feel that kept coming on in waves and it was something that struck me in particular about their current direction.  As far as I’m aware, this is definitely something new, in terms of their jamming style. The set thrived  with energy and gave each band member their own moment(s) to really shine.

If you have a chance, get up offa your thing and go see Karl D!  After the tour he played a few dates with Fred Wesley and the Greyboy Allstars, covering their original debut in its entirety to wrap up the year in Southern CA -including a stop in the Bay area for NYE- before heading out “on a boat” for Jamcruise 10.  The Sticky Fingers tour “with special guests” (including Anders Osborne) will continue with their East Coast leg launching at the beginning of February.  This is not to be missed folks!

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CLICK HERE for tour dates.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW:

SET ONE (Sticky Fingers)

SET TWO

Electronic music is not my genre of expertise, so it came as a surprise to me when I heard AO’s soothing and ambient tones on his solo release.  I had the good fortune of then, seeing him live at the Dropping Gems Showcase at Decibel Festival, where he was joined by friend and frequent collaborator, Zuri Biringer, whose lilting guitar riffs added a grounded sense of nature, invoking images of sky and water.  It’s impossible to listen to the Seattle native’s sound without being drawn to the beats.  However, while they ultimately drive the music forward, they aren’t the primary focus of the songs, which create a vivid mood through crooning vocals, guitar, and keyboard.  In combination with some incredible imagery that accompanied the performance, the set was nearly transcendent.

Not long after his show that night, I was able to sit down with Alex to discuss his development as a DJ and find out where he draws his inspiration from.  His ambient sound was a divergence from the sounds that I had heard from him previously and I had many questions.  Eloquently and in fascinating detail, he was able to give me answers to questions that I didn’t even know that I had.  To an electronic media newbie, like myself, I found him to be incredibly informative and insightful; even providing hints on where to start my own exploration of the vast genre.  In the end, he was even so helpful as to give a demonstration of how he creates his unique style.

The following is the transcript from that conversation.

PARVANEH: I guess my basic question would be, when did you get interested in electronic music and where did you see yourself going when you started?

DJAO: So, I don’t really know where to begin really.  I guess the first time that I ever heard an electronic music song that I thought, “Oh shit this is really incredible,” I heard- yeah, I guess it’s like the first track from the Beastie Boys album, Hello Nasty.  Yeah I heard it in like sixth grade.  We were sitting on a bus.  We were on a school trip and they had the CD and that was when that album came out, and I remember hating on it quite a bit.  -I’m sorry, I’m really OCD, I just need to make sure this is recording right.

[Checks on the recording]

Anyway so sixth grade on the bus?

So, sixth grade on the bus.  I remember I saw- I don’t know, it’s a long story, but I saw the Beastie Boys album cover and I was like, “I bet that sucks!”  and I was on this bus ride, and a friend of mine lent it to me.  I thought that them rapping was pretty cool, but the beat… everything about it was just so crazy to me.  It was like, “Wow, this is one of the hardest pieces of music I’ve ever heard”.  Up until then, I was just listening to 90s alternative.  I was really into Rage Against the Machine and stuff like that.  Then, through the Beastie Boys…  Their DJ is one of the best scratch DJs, his name is Mixmaster Mike and is one of the craziest musicians who uses a turntable, basically.  He’s really out there and really experimental and the crew that he’s from is really experimental.  They’ve done a lot of work.  They’ve released albums around turntables, using them to produce sound that I don’t think anyone’s really matched…  The whole turntable thing really died out.  That’s the way I really came to it, ’cause I really started DJing sophomore year of high school.  I wasn’t even DJing for people.  I was just, literally, in my room with the turntables just scratching for like ,two years probably…  Just scratching, listening to really, really weird beats made by other DJs and scratching with no purpose and no plan whatsoever.

Then I started DJing high school parties and dances and stuff, but I was still basically listening to all hip hop.  So, then I started DJing out.  Playing shows and stuff, just doing dances for friends at their houses and fundraisers.  You know, high schools.  Then, I went to college and I was still pretty much just listening to hip hop all the time and DJing and all that, and my style of DJing just started to get weirder -like the chopped and screwed stuff that I do now when I DJ, as opposed to my live show- started freshman and sophomore year.  I mean, it started in High School, but that’s when it really started to flourish.

And then, it was my junior year, when I studied abroad in London, where I really got exposed to-  Well, I was kind of eclectic, but when I moved to a different city where no one listened to hip hop, or most of my friends didn’t listen to hip hop, I suddenly learned about just so many different kinds of music and started to go out and see it live, which had a lot to do with me starting to catch on.  Especially when, around that time, that was…  that was 2007-2008…  That wasn’t when dubstep first started, but it was right when it was blowing up in-  Before it had blown up in America, but when it was becoming really developed and popular and a lot of people were starting to accept it as cutting edge and interesting.  And a lot of my favorite artists are dubstep artist who are from that era and who I saw live.  Like Benga,who I saw live before his album came out.  I only knew him through the internet.  I didn’t come to London knowing anything and, sitting in my room in London on the internet and realizing that all these super cutting edge dudes, who are so interesting and fascinating to me, are all in the city I was in, I was like, “Oh my god, I have to go to some of these shows”.  I remember, when I went to see Benga -I couldn’t find anybody to go with me- and, I remember I was just lying in bed that night and I was like, “Well, what am I gonna do tonight?  Am I just going to smoke and pass out, or am I going to go to this show by myself?“  And I went and, first of all, I met him and then, that is where I met my British girlfriend, totally randomly.

So it worked out well.

Turned out to be a good choice.  But I came back and my senior year just completely changed the music I DJed.  I started listening to electro, started listening to way more dubstep, and started listening to futurebeat.  Which is I guess is where you’d put me now, sort of.  But there’s a lot of words for it, like IDM.

What would that stand for?

That stands for “Intelligent Dance Music.”  It’s for like, experimental 90 beats per minute roughly.  It’s a pretty nebulous term.  It has a lot of connotations with music that came out in the mid-late 90s, or early 2000s.

I know when I saw you at the Baltic Room last fall, it definitely sounded like-  I mean, I’m sure it also had to do with the theme of the night, but it sounded much more dubstep-style.  A lot of heavy beats, but definitely pretty scratchy, do you feel like you were influenced by glitch at all, either?

You know, I think I was more influenced more by J Dilla than I was by any hard IDM or hard glitch, and I have friends who are really into glitch, like Calvin from Ghost Feet…  We did a Portland show recently and he drove me down from Olympia and he said, “You should check out this hard minimum glitch that I got from France.”  He said, “This stuff is so computer error,” and I was like, I like this stuff, but I don’t.  I don’t seek it out.  It definitely influences my music but it’s not like…

Not one of your main influences…

Not one of my main influences.  I think mainly it influences me through other artists that inspire me.  But that particular show was a DJ set, right?

Yeah

So yeah, I remember that set, that was really fun.  That was a lot of hip hop and chillwave and future beat and there was definitely some really crazy dubstep in there too.

*laughing* Yeah.

Yeah, the guy who booked me, Ill Cosby, is a future bass DJ and so, I pulled out more of my upper tempo- you know, strange, really mindblowingly arranged dance tunes for that one, more than I normally do.

I think…  I want to go back to that, too, but for your current stuff -like your Ep and the stuff you played at Decibel Festival- is much more low key, kind of with Zuri playing guitar and the singing aspect of it…  I’d been keeping up with your pieces coming out on the Dropping Gems compilations and, when your EP came out, I thought, “Wow, where did this come from?“  It sounded like a completely different style.  Was this something you were building up to, or was it something you didn’t really have the opportunity to do with the Dropping Gems Collective, or….?

Well all of that music is definitely like Dropping Gems music-

Really?

Yeah, because I make a lot of different kinds of music, but I have my more up-tempo stuff coming out on Car Crash Set in the middle of November, and I also have just straight dance music, like just regular dance music…  I guess it’s not regular, but to me it is, I just sit down and I think, “I’m gonna make a Baltimore club tune” and it just comes out however it comes out.  But, like the first song on the EP, “Underbrush,” when I sat down to make that, I thought, “I’m gonna make a dubstep tune” and that’s what came out…  So, I don’t always know. *laughter*  But, in my head, I classify it one way, but people…  But, that material is mostly over a year old.  Like “Green Lake” was a song I made right when I got a computer.  Like, I was in Seattle a while without a computer.

I guess I didn’t finish explaining…  When I graduated from college, I started working at a production company and started using the studio there and that’s how I actually started making beats.  I mean, I made beats in high school in the digital media lab on GarageBand and so, then using Logic -which is the professional version of GarageBand- which was at the studio I was working at, was not difficult.  And I still have tons of material from that time that hasn’t been released and I don’t know if it will ever be released and what I’ll do with it.  It doesn’t really matter, but all that stuff is really different.  But, I moved back to Seattle and, a couple months later, I got a computer; it was that summer.  Summer of 2010.  So, a little over a year ago.

So do you feel like you identify with some of the kinds of music that you’ve put out any more than others?  Like, do you feel like the stuff that came out on your EP was maybe stuff that expressed more of an individual style, or…?

Well, it’s hard to say with that, specifically.  I mean, all of that is really, really personal stuff, but, like I said, it’s pretty much a good record of the last year.  “Green Lake,” I made it last summer.  I made “Taigamoss”…  I made it last fall or winter.  “Underbrush” I’ve literally been working on for a year, at least.  “Moon Sun Ravine” just started as a beat with those voices, and that shit is really old too.  “Through The Field” is relatively recent, but couldn’t be any newer than the Spring.  The only thing that really I made this summer would be the second half of “Moon Sun Ravine” with Zuri playing the guitar, which I just made while I was living on Capitol Hill and I just called Zuri and said, “Man can you come over and play?  Bring your guitar I need to finish this goddamn EP.”

So how did the partnership…?

Yeah, the collaboration, the collaborative partnership-

…the collaboration with Zuri come about?

We’ve just been friends for a long time- Man, when was the first time we jammed?  I don’t even know… the first thing that comes to mind is a song called “Forest,” which I played live at the Decibel show…  No, there’s another song, it’s called “Pacific City”…  Me and Zuri went down to Portland.  I think Zuri actually just came down to kick it, just the two of us went down to kick it with the Dropping Gems people.  This is like when I was first getting to know all of them.  And we just hung out and, at one point, we went to the Oregon coast and we went to this place called Pacific City, which was really, really, really incredible.  But yeah, at a certain point, he came over to the house and I had just put together-  Well, I think I might have actually, just done it all at once…  I just played some pads, played some noises, I had a couple different sounds, just a couple different chords on top of each other, or maybe just one chord, and I said, “Hey Zuri, just play some guitar over this” and a week later, I just went in and just chopped up what he had played and put it into a sampler and just played it.  And, because I don’t know how to play piano and I don’t know how to play guitar and, because like of all these things… collaborating with people who are really talented like Zuri, who is, first of all, unbelievably talented, but he’s also got exactly the same (well not exactly the same) but in the exact same continuum that I am, in terms of taste and definitely in terms of melodic sensibility, is great.

Of course.

And, during the Decibel show, he was really blowing me away.  He recorded that set -or, someone did- and I don’t know where it is.  I meant to record it, but was too flustered in the process of getting everything set up.  It just turned out to be just a really happy accident.  It wasn’t really an accident, but really an organic thing that I didn’t have to plan at all.  He would just come in and play over the things I made, I’d chop it up in the sampler and it would add so much.  We did a couple more songs that way and it developed into a thing that was just really, really fruitful from a production standpoint, and I realized, if we can do this in the studio, this would be perfect live, too.  He came through and played at the Electric Tea Garden and it was amazing.  It really helped my anxieties, ’cause there’s a general sense of anxiety when you’re playing music like this that is generally done in a studio ahead of time.  When you’re not like, just pressing play on an Ipod, which I have literally seen people do before…

Right *laughing*

So, having it be done as much live as possible is really important thing for me and I’m not anywhere near where I want to be in terms of that.  Like, I just do what I can at the moment and, as I get to be a better musician, I’ll add more.

Well, I think the stuff you’ve done with Zuri always sounds really natural.  I think, a lot of times, when people have another instrument come in, it can sound weird, but I was actually playing your EP with my boyfriend -this is kind of an aside- but he said, “God, this would be really great with some guitar over it,” and then all the sudden Zuri comes in and he was like, “oh! Perfect!”  So, I think it feels really natural and makes a lot of sense.  And, I guess I have a lot of questions, too, about how you put your music together on a technical level.  I mean, I have NO knowledge about the process of making electronic music; like what programs you use or how you put it together, but I guess I’ll save those for later when you show me how it works.

Having seen your previous show and having heard the stuff that’s been coming out on compilation CDs, I think I heard a much more obviously complex kind of a sound from you, like you were saying about the show that I saw; that you were really kind of throwing everything out there.  And it seems like a lot of your recordings have been showcasing a lot of different skills that you have technically as a DJ.  When you came out with your EP, or your stuff that you’ve been working on longer term, the sound seemed to be a lot simpler on the surface.  Though, seeing you live, I feel like I could tell the complexities in the beats, which kind of moved around a little bit, subtly changing tempos.  Why did you make that change in your sound?

Well, it wasn’t that much of a change for me, really, because that’s how I’ve always done it.  I just hadn’t released any of it, so no one really knew.  When DJing, I’m so eclectic and I’m drawn to so many different things…  The biggest distinction, though, is that I’m playing other peoples’ music and not, you know, not mine.  I’m not creating that stuff that I play.  Anyway, the thing about my live shows is that I don’t have a template or formula for making song, and I don’t have a formula for structuring songs in the middle of making them and, especially if I come back to something that I was working on… anything new that I do will be different than what I was originally doing.  It’ll be in the same vein, but… you can really tell on the fourth track of the EP, “Moon Sun Ravine,” there’s the part where the voice is and then, there’s the part with the guitar.  And they were both made months apart from each other.  And so, you can just tell.  And, for some people, the switch may be too much.  I know I had long conversations with people, in Dropping Gems specifically, who just said,”the guitar is too much, it’s too jarring.”  I agonized about that for a little while, but eventually, I decided to keep it.  But, in any event, the reason why tempos change and beats change is because that’s just what happens when I play the songs.

Right, I wasn’t meaning that in a negative way.  I really like that, actually.

Yeah.  No, I mean, I have plenty of thoughts about what to say like, “Well, you know, life is always changing.”

*Laughter*

But seriously, life is never in a lock-step meter.  You know, every day could potentially be a revolutionary day.  Like, if something crazy happens and you have to upend your whole life… that’s kind of what this summer’s been like for me a little bit.  Things have finally settled down, but also there’s a lot of points on the EP and in my live set where there aren’t any drums at all.  It’s just ambient.  And then, drums come in and that’s kind of similar to the patterns of life, you know.  Activity and inactivity, or inspiration and depression, or whatever else you want to say.  So, the EP is also narrative, so it really has a specific narrative…  It’s like a trip, like a walk in the woods, you know?  And there’s stops and starts to that experience, too.  There’s parts where you’re walking down a hill and you might trip, or other times where things are just mundane and you’re trying to stay in line.

So, just to clarify, the narrative is the movement of someone through….?

Well, it’s just natural environments, forests, specifically.  Obviously, it’s not a specific place, it’s more fantasy-based than that.

I think you can definitely feel that in the EP.   Obviously, the names of the songs tend to imply that naturalness.  I guess that, to me as a listener, hearing some of your stuff that’s more rhythm-heavy and complex, compared to the ambient sounds that you have on the EP, it definitely seems to be much more reminiscent of nature as opposed to mechanics.

Yeah, definitely.  I mean, that’s the thing about… I love electronic music…  I was thinking about this the other day.  It’s probably the genre of music where the most exciting things are happening, just in general.  But, you know, there’s a significant history to electronic music and a lot of the pioneers…  I’m not like a hard electronic music nerd.  Especially with pioneer stuff.  I mean, I might get myself in trouble for saying this, but… I don’t like rigid, harsh, computer sounds.  I just don’t.  That’s what a lot of people make and that’s actually what’s popular, essentially.  Mid-range dubstep that has a lot of spikey computer sounds and huge over-compressed kicks and snares, it sounds like robots screaming and stuff.  There’s definitely a nice, enjoyable side to that music, but it seems like there’s way more bad than good and there’s way more inorganic electronic music.

Do they do that to put an emphasis on skill?

Well, not so much that, it’s just an aesthetic.  It’s a harsh aesthetic, and it’s an aesthetic that lacks a lot of mechanic rhythm.  It honestly, just has a lot to do with people partying.

It’s different for me, because I use a computer as my main instrument, but I don’t want to express robotic ideas or cold, synthetic ideas, or rigid ideas.

One of the cool things, I think, about the EP is that, because of the ambient sounds and getting away from the more mechanical aspects of electronic music, where the beat isn’t the emphasis, but has a large effect on the feeling of the music, it seems to have an appeal to more people who are outside of the electronic music world.  Were you intentionally trying to reach outside of that scene?

Well, not really.  It’s something I want, but it’s not something I’m explicitly aiming for in my head when I am making the music.  Part of it’s just that I have pretty eclectic taste and I like seeing a lot of different things live, you know.  I actually went to my first death metal show on Friday and it was a really extreme scene, but it’s really awesome, too.  I just got booked for a show in Portland and I’m playing right before the headliner and it’s just an indie band.  No one else on the bill is electronic and to me that makes perfect sense.  I don’t want to appeal to just one crowd and… there’s people I know I won’t appeal to, but…  I mean, I would love to appeal to everyone.  I guess I’m kind of insecure that way, you know, I’d love if everyone liked me.

*Laughter*

But, I don’t think that I want one scene or audience versus another.  And I like to make people feel comfortable and to communicate positive information and feelings, especially in a live setting where people are congregated together.  It’s nice to be able to communicate that individually to people through their headphones or whatever, but specifically when I’m physically there performing and creating sounds where there are a lot of people congregated to hear it, I really, really want what I’m transmitting to be positive.  I mean, I have a lot of music and I play these things that communicate a negative state of mind, but I try to do it in a way that’s enjoyable or at least uplifting.

There are a lot of artists, in my genre specifically, who are about being as harsh and nasty as possible and people go to those shows and are like “Yeah play the crazy shit!” and I totally respect that and sometimes I feel like that.  Like I said, I went to this metal show and it was awesome, but it was definitely some of the heaviest and most brutal stuff I’ve seen live.

Well, that kind of leads into what I think is going to be one of my final questions.  For you, what do you think are the advantages to playing a live show vs. a studio recording and vice versa?

Well, live shows are totally different, because (with) in studio recordings, I’m spending hours and hours and hours trying to find the right sounds and put them together correctly and getting them all mixed and balanced correctly, and to get the thing I’m looking for, which I only have the vaguest idea about and don’t really know it until I find it.  It just takes forever and it’s emotionally kind of harrowing and it’s just a mess and it takes a while.  And then, once I’ve found it, I’ve found it and it’s like a happy accident and I can enjoy it.  And in a live performance, it’s just about communicating that hard work to people in the most accessible way possible.  The most important work happens in the studio and the live show is like a celebration of what I’ve managed to find.  And I get to do some of it live, so it’s interesting to watch, but mostly it’s like, “Look what I found, guys!”

I know you mentioned this earlier and you didn’t really have a chance to talk about this, but you brought up that there were certain people who (you) felt like witnessing their live shows was really influential to you and (I was wondering) if you’d like to talk about it and how it influenced you….

Well yeah, James Blake is the pinnacle to me, as far as this section of electronic music goes, and he is a polarizing figure, I guess.  But to me, he’s the only person who has taken, well… I mean, I read an interview with him once and people asked him, “What’s your live show going to be like?” ’cause he was still developing it, and he said, “Well I just want it to be like Mount Kimbie’s philosophy on it.”  They’re another British group and they’re similar, but they don’t take it quite as far as James Blake, which is for him to basically play every note live.  Which is… it’s electronic music.  It’s made over multi-track on a computer -he makes it himself in his bedroom- but when he tours, he has a guy playing the drums and a guy playing the guitar and using a sampler, and he’s singing and playing the keyboards, and every sound that you hear on the record (and it may be slightly different) is being made live and being produced live and, to me, that’s the ideal.

So, do you see yourself moving in that direction in the future?

I have so many plateaus I have to reach before I can do that.  I have to learn to play the piano, I have to learn how to arrange for a band and I have to find…  I think Zuri would be a perfect person to tour with, which is why I do, but I’d have to figure out where I fit in and how I could have control over the sounds that I want to have control over.

Flying Lotus is another person who tours with a drummer and Thundercat is a bass player from LA who’s like, amazing.  He’s at a computer consul doing stuff and controlling the sounds and letting the band members go wild, which is kind of what I do, but way, way, way less talent and control in my situation.

Mount Kimbie are another good example, but they run a lot of stuff off samplers.  They play guitar live and they play drum pads live and stuff, and they have a snare that they hit every once in a while, so they’re another good example of that.

Shlohmo’s newest album is really organic and he uses loops, which is another option potentially, but I like playing with other people.  It’s basically, translating what my really personal ideas are and having control over them and then expanding that to include other people.  It’s a tremendous challenge…

Also Brown Bear, who is in Dropping Gems, has a project where he plays with a full band.   And Toro y Moi, one of my favorite beatmakers, had one of the best albums in 2010, and now he plays with a band and his music is different, because he plays with a band, and it’s amazing, but it’s just not what I would have wanted him to do, just because I love that one album so much… but, it also reminds me that it’s just not something that I think I’d be able to do to full satisfaction for a few years.

Thanks so much for talking to me about this.  I think we should wrap up this section of the interview and head over to see how you make your music.

Sounds good.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

After the interview, Alex let me come check out his studio, where he demonstrated how he creates a track from scratch.  It was a really great way to end the day and to round out some of my newfound knowledge of the electronic music artform.

[Unfortunately, the flip cam recording the footage doesn't capture the bass very well.]

LINKS:

Find out more about DJAO from the following links…

DJAO on Facebook
DJAO on SOUNDCLOUD
DJAO Dropping Gems Profile

His EP, Wuhn, can heard and/or purchased by “name your price” through here: http://droppinggems.bandcamp.com/album/wuhn

His more recent release is an installment of the No Northwest series put out by the Car Crash Set Label.  The series is an effort to spotlight Northwest producers and is a split EP, which he shares with HxdB, a Vancouver producer.  Two of the tracks are from DJAO; one being a solo piece called, “Just For Today” and the other, “Meditation,” being a collaboration with Yuk.  It is his first “for-money,” wide-release EP and is available for purchase at the following links:
BeatPort
AMAZON
Boomkat

Photo Credit:

Header image taken by Parvaneh Angus.

All other images are provided courtesy of Lara Schneider.

[CLICK HERE to jump directly to giveaway]

Back in the early 2000s, I lived in Olympia, Wa and there was a lot of DIY music and media production happening in the small college town.  People were mixing albums in their basements, silk-screening posters and T-shirts in their kitchens, and using DV, High-8, and/or Super-8 cameras to record short films in dusty fields and damp alley ways.  My friend Mac Dawg was taking advantage of the fact that we had a local public access station to create his own programs.  His original idea was to film a fictional, biopic-style sitcom based around Kurt Cobain in the 80s, referencing his tenure as an Olympia resident.  Being a Jewish Puerto Rican in his early twenties who had dread locks and mutton chops at the time, he came to the conclusion that I would be the perfect person to star as the dead, blonde, white grunge-rock icon in the re-imagining.  The project never actually came to fruition, but, during a random house party at Mac Dawg‘s house, I came up with my own idea for another program by the name of “TANGENT.”  The basic premise was that I would have guests on, like an informal talk show, and then just consistently shift the topic on them.  [I only have brief glimpses of memory pertaining to coming up with the idea... I was really drunk.]  One morning Mac Dawg wakes me up with a phone call and asks if I’m ready to do the show.  “What show?” I asked.  I thought that he might be referring to the Cobain thing again.  He explained that it was my idea and that I should get ready, because he was planning to film it that morning.  I threw on a slim, denim 1970s pantsuit (just vest and pants) and a large plastic dollar sign necklace, bought a case of OLY stubbies and came up with/scribbled down some topic ideas onto a piece of scrap paper during the ride over to his basement, where the video equipment was set up.  Between being awaken to sitting in the basement getting miked, it was probably 1/2 hour total.  It was about 9am, I had taken down enough alcohol to get rolling and we went from there.  There was no real podcasting back then and there was no Youtube whatsoever.  There was no real direction for the program either and, although I’d like to believe that it had it’s moments, there was a decent amount of aimlessness involved.  I imagine that doing an improvised standup routine must be similar to trying to carry an unscripted program and helping it to remain interesting; it can get awkward quicker than you may think.  If I we could have harnessed those select moments, expanded them, and worked tirelessly on them for years, I could still only have hoped to yield something half as effortlessly smooth and entertaining as the podcast, “Uhh Yeah Dude.”

Tangent only made it to about 5… possibly, 6 episodes (for good reason).  UYD, on the other hand, just clocked in their 300th episode, since their 2006 inception, just last week.  With no particular frills, regularly scheduled celebrity guests, or even a consistently designated theme, the staying power of the program rests solely on the shoulders of its two co-hosts, their abilities to expand upon and quickly interject life into whatever topics that they do find themselves on, and their undeniable rapport with each other.  Visually somewhat of an odd couple, Jonathan “JAH” Larroquette is a bearded, cigarette-smoking, longhaired, vegan that generally remains seated while sporting either worn-in T-shirts or tanktops, while Seth Romatelli is a clean-shaven character with a finely coiffed do (rockabilly light?) consistently standing and/or moving about in, typically Western-cut, collared button-ups.  If Larroquette‘s name sounds familiar, it’s because he is, in fact, the son of Emmy award-winning actor, John “Dan ‘Reinhold‘ Fielding” Larroquette (Night Court).  He is also 1/2 of the electronic duo JOGGER that was signed to Daedelus‘ Magical Properties label, released an album back in 1999, and went on the Magical Properties tour with the electronic pioneer/label-head and Nosaj Thing back in 2010 (a tour that his dad tweeted about accompanying him on).  If Romatelli‘s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you are already aware of the Uhh Yeah Dude podcast.  Either that, or you might be a huge fan of his bit part as a “talent organzier” in the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads (2001) or as an obsessed celebrity memorabilia collector in the Hallmark made-for-tv movie, McBride: Anybody Here Murder Marty? (2005), starring his co-podcaster’s father a year before their hour-long web series was ever launched.  Whether it’s John‘s dad or Seth‘s appearance in a shitty teen film, neither Larrouquette or Romatelli shy away from their history, but that’s clearly not the basis of the program at all and, at the most, those topics might very rarely surface in the midst of their continuous banter.  What really carries the show are the hosts’ unrestrained social commentaries and back-and-forth between each other.  I haven’t listened to that many pod casts in general, but I have always gotten the impression that they were hosted by “experts” in one field or another, or that “experts” were often brought in to weigh in on some subject matter.  What’s great about UYD is that these guys don’t really claim to be experts in anything.  What they do, however, is make their listeners want to be involved in the topics themselves and, regardless of how absurd or trivial the topics may technically be, they definitely get the mental cogs churning and explore some visually descriptive avenues while they explore them.

Here’s a bit of a breakdown on the podcast and it’s success, via the press release:

Described as “A weekly roundup of America through the eyes of two American-Americans”, Uhh Yeah Dude (UYD) is available free via the Apple iTunes store.

Uhh Yeah Dude is a comedy podcast containing discussion and free-form comedy by host Seth Romatelli and co-host Jonathan Larroquette. Episode 1 of Uhh Yeah Dude first aired on February 11, 2006 and quickly gained a world-wide fanbase.

UYD is consistently ranked within the top 10 of Podcast Alley’s 3,000+ comedy podcasts. Additionally, Podcast Alley monthly ratings for almost 50,000 podcasts often rank UYD in the top 100 podcasts worldwide in all podcast categories. Since the summer of 2008, UYD has held a coveted spot on the front page of iTunes’ featured podcasts, where they are consistently in the top 50 iTunes comedy podcasts. Uhh Yeah Dude is recorded weekly and a new episode is available on iTunes every Sunday.

The show has utilized the video format several times. The first, and most famous, was when the duo recorded their 100th episode and posted it as a video podcast. Since then, UYD has engaged more professional video help and posted high-quality video clips of their show on YouTube.

Considering that the best way to really get a grasp on what UYD is all about would be to experience it, we’ve included a few of the aforementioned YouTube video here for your viewing pleasure.  In these following clips they tackle such serious issues as…

DRUGS:

Click here to view the embedded video.

PARENTING:

Click here to view the embedded video.

and…

PARENTING with Drugs:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’ve likely noticed that some of these clips were filmed in front live studio audiences.  That’s because, occasionally, UYD will go out and do live tapings of their podcasts in venues around the country.  On Friday, January 13th the guys will being make one such appearance at the Neptune Theatre here in Seattle.  Coincidentally, Friday the 13th was one of the topics on their recent 300th episode.  Also, somewhat coincidentally (but not really, because that’s what this post is created for), our friends at the Seattle Theatre Group provided us with a pair of tickets to give away to one of yooz lucky jerk awffs.

Tickets can be purchased for the event HERE

BLITZEN TRAPPER
DAWES
Neptune Theatre
Seattle, Wa
11.11.11

Last month we posted a brief write-up, along with a ticket giveaway for The Belle Brigade, Dawes, and Blitzen Trapper show at the Neptune here in Seattle.  The contest was super last minute and even more last minute was my decision to pop on over to the show and photograph it.  My credentials came through that evening and I decided that, if I had a photo pass, it would probably be worth swinging down there for it.  With a baby and a bunch of other shit going on, responsibility-wise, it’s not as easy to simply fly out the door on a moments notice anymore.

Blitzen Trapper was the obvious draw for me.  I have their album, FURR and the Black River Killer EP and am familiar with the Wild Mountain Nation record that was released prior to those, but I never really listened to last year’s Destroyer of the Void or heard anything off of their newest release, American Goldwing, which came out in September.  I remembered them being a fairly solid live act, but I hadn’t seen them since they played a free outdoor show by the Space Needle back in July of ’09.  I expected to be guestlisted for last year’s show with Wye Oak at Seattle’s Showbox during City Arts Fest, but when it turned out that I wasn’t, I said “Fuck it!” and rolled up to the see fellow SUBPOP label-mates, The Vaselines again for their overlapping festival stop at Neumos; a decision that I didn’t regret.  The Blitzen Trapper fans that I know didn’t seem too impressed with Destroyer and even BT frontman, Eric Earley who “cobbled together“ the album referred to it as “a patchwork of songs from (his) past and present which hung together like a house of cards.” American Goldwing, on the other hand, was created out of inspiration and, for all intents and purposes, was finished before the tour for Destroyer of the Void ever began.  While the group promoted the latter in front of the largest audiences of their careers (festivals, TV appearances, etc.), Earley concedes that, throughout that entire time, he knew “that this new record (he’d) recorded was the real record, the Blitzen Trapper record to come.“  Of course, that never did anything to prevent fans from defending Destroyer to death in the comment sections under any review that was less than high praise.

Even more vocal have been DAWES fans in the comment sections under reviews regarding their opening slot at this recent Seattle show.  The event itself was advertised as part of a “co-headlining” tour for DAWES and Blitzen Trapper, with the Belle Brigade operating as their opener.  I was mostly unfamiliar with The Belle Brigade, aside from random advertisements for the duo that had previously graced this site, a random late night appearance that I caught, and a YouTube video of the brother and sister team sitting in a bathtub while performing an acoustic rendition of their biggest hit, “Losers.”  I missed their set entirely, but the reviews have been generally favorable.  When I arrived, DAWES had already started playing.  I worked my way down towards the front and a lady touched me on the shoulder, in an effort to direct me as to where I should be standing to get a good photograph.  No, she didn’t work there or anything; she was just some random woman with her husband, but I guess that she just figured that we were all good friends at the show that night and that she was being helpful.  [No thanks, I think that I should be able to figure this one out for myself.]

It’s not surprising to discover that DAWES had been part of the touring Dave Matthews Band Caravan festival this year, because the crowd looked like they followed them directly from a DMB show… or maybe a Jack Johnson / Ben Harper performance or, dare I suggest it, a Jason Mraz gig.  I snapped off a couple of shots from where I was standing and then moved to the other side of the crowd, which found me surrounded by young, early-twenties college kids who seemed to know all of the lyrics.  Frontman, Taylor Goldsmith has just enough scruff to be the guy with the guitar at the party -looking rugged but not ragged- and the set, which had an equivalent vibe, simply fell flat for me.  They’ve been described as having that “Laurel Canyon” folk sound, which makes sense, because they actually did record their debut album, North Hills, in Laurel Canyon.  [Zappa lived there too, but that's, obviously, not the sound that they're being compared to.]  That album spawned the track “When My Time Comes” which you may have heard soundtracking the History Channel’s recent Pawn Stars/American Pickers promo.  It’s a well enough written song which, if you only heard that track alone, could place Dawes on the fence between, “Hey, I bet these guys probably have a solid collection of nicely constructed folk tunes” and “This is some contrived, emotionless Hollywood singer songwriter jive turkey bullshit.”  The fact that the official video was a tribute to Cool Hand Luke was encouraging and had me hoping that they were a little more Neil Young and less VH1.  Unfortunately, their other big song, “Time Spent in Los Angeles” seemed to suggest that they were, in fact, very much of the Video Hits folk variety and that they wouldn’t likely be venturing too deep into any John Prine or Heartworn Highways territories.  Their set had the energy of an award show performance and the solos were as clean and uninteresting as could be expected.  The show ended just as their fanbase must have hoped, with both of the aforementioned hits played back to back.  In other words, without any surprises.

On paper it would almost make sense to mash Blitzen Trapper and Dawes onto the same bill.  Now that BT recently switched their management to Big Hassle (same as Dawes) I can see someone thinking, “Hey, these are our two folky rock outfits and, if we put them together, this would be a match made in heaven. Plus, they could fill out the bill for each other, depending on what town they’re in.”  In Seattle, Portland-based Blitzen Trapper was the headliner.  In other city’s I’m sure this was switched up.  Dawes plays Dave Mathews festivals and BT plays festivals like Pitchfork.  They could both converge at something like Sasquatch!, but tonight it would be at the Neptune Theatre in the University District.

Since the last time that I saw them, Blitzen Trapper has lost keyboardist, Drew Laughery, effectively making them a quintet.  Adjusting to this, they began the set with a Nord set up in front of Eric Earley for the first couple of songs.  If you haven’t seen the group before, it’s important to note that some of the members will move around between instruments during their sets.  Earley plays both acoustic and electric guitars, the keys, and occasionally breaks out the harmonica “bridle” around the neck.  Erik Menteer will pause his lead guitar duties to man another Nord, or even to smash the shit out of a tambourine.  Marty Marquis might be on keys, then shift to guitar, or even melodica.  Brian Adrian Koch, even took a moment to man the melodica at this show, between his drumming and vocal duties and, at one point, I even noticed that bassist, Michael VanPelt had some sort of whistle-like contraption jammed in his mouth like a pacifier while he played.  Drew’s absence didn’t seem to affect them too much and they have adapted seamlessly.

Whether their entire set was really that good or simply appeared tobe great in contrast to the band before them, BT had a ton of energy and it came through incredibly natural and didn’t feel forced at all.  They began with “Sleepy Time in the Western World,” the lead off track from FURR and then went immediately into “Astronaut” from American Goldwing, before following it up with the album’s title track.  The set consisted of a healthy chunk from the new release and, as someone who was previously unfamiliar with any of that material, they were able to retain my attention completely.  The new tracks merged in with the older material effortlessly, but still managed to lead the performance into new and interesting directions.  There were a handful of cuts from Furr, a couple of tracks from Wild Mountain Nation, and even one (technically, 2) song(s) from the Black River Killer EP.  There was only one from Destroyer of the Void.

The set breathed up and down and expanded outward, but the shifts didn’t necessarily come strictly from song to song, but rather moment to moment, as well.  Every thing meshed and transitioned well from one tune to the next and the guys really steamrolled through once they got rolling; accelerating, slowing down, dropping through loops, and zipping up and around the walls like a TYCO Niteglow electric slot car race-track.  I spent the majority of the show in front of Menteer, watching him viciously chop away at his guitar and drain the life-force from his keyboard, while Koch pummeled away at the drumkit behind him.  During a few select moments, the typically more composed, Earley haphazardly flung himself across the stage, showcasing his ability to strangle out shrieking guitar solos of his own.  They encored with “Fire and Fast Bullets” before dropping into an immediately recognizable Zeppelin riff and ending the night with “Good Times, Bad Times.”

I had planned my coverage for this show -if any- to be a photo set, at best.  I generally keep to myself at shows, but I wound up talking to a young intern who was shooting for the Seattle Weekly that night and, while editing through my photos, I decided to bounce around and see if I could find whatever images other photographers at the show came away with.  Whether it was the Weekly, The Seattle P.I./Blogcritics.org, or the website Sound on the Sound, I began to recognize a pattern, as well as a mind boggling anomaly, throughout: for the most part, I actually agreed with them.  It was pretty clear to everyone that Dawes fell flat on the stage, while Blitzen Trapper put on an engaging and high energy show for their greatly deserved headlining spot.  Another defining thread between the reviews were the comments by Dawes supporters under them, which ranged from overly defensive statements to responses as simple and minimal as “Wrong.”  One person even inaccurately claimed, “Jeez – That’s the first review from this tour that had anything bad to say about Dawes.“  Perhaps, but it definitely wasn’t the last and I couldn’t find another one regarding this particular show that felt any different.  However, as stated before, the Belle Brigade set that I missed, was met with fairly positive responses, prompting some to insist that they outdid the supposed “co-headliner.”

It’s true that there shouldn’t be any real need to compare Blitzen Trapper and Dawes or to pit them against each other, but when you advertise something as weird as a “co-headlining tour” and the sets are so lopsided, it’s hard not to imagine how off it would have seemed if their performance orders had been switched.  Another thing that I began to notice was that Dawes‘ latest release,  Nothing Is Wrong was continuing to gain some hype and being suggested as one of the best albums of 2011 (Paste, Rolling Stone, a guy I know, etc).  I found a video of the song “A Little Bit of Everything” from the album, which Dawes played right before their other 2 hits that ended their set.  In this version, Taylor Goldsmith was performing solo acoustic on a radio show and it was still being referred to as a “new song.” The fucked up thing about it was that it actually sounded fairly credible and a hell of a lot better than when I saw it live.  The vocal delivery was direct and understated, as was his delicate guitar work.  There was an emotional quality to it that I hadn’t experienced at the show and his intention and ability to create a story with his lyrics were commendable enough.  I still wasn’t in love, but I understood the appeal a bit more and it showcased some promise for Goldsmith as a songwriter/lyricist.  From there I found a video of him performing the song with nothing but piano accompaniment.  It was generally the same version, except that it was slightly worse.  Whereas the lyrics had floated over gentle plucking of the strings prior, the piano was now making it less subtle by emphasizing the cadence in the verses, and the guitar work, which was the highlight of the last version, had devolved into nothing but a strum.  Finally, I found a recent live video that demonstrated the “evolution” of the track and it mirrored what I had experienced in Seattle.  The song begins with the frontman mussing up the back of his hair, while the piano, drums, and bass come in.  By now he has abandoned the acoustic, altogether, in favor of an electric guitar that’s simply hanging around his neck without him even playing it.  There’s a smirk on his face, because he knows that people know the lyrics now, so he begins to perform the track to the audience, making it more about the idea that they’re playing it, than about what they’re actually playing.  Everything that made the original sound authentic was gone; the drums have little military-style snare hits here and there and Taylor is accentuating the lyrics, both with his vocal delivery and by pantomiming stupid shit along to them.  The cheesiest parts of the lyrics, which were just barely overlooked in the stripped down version, are now said much louder, “It’s the death of my first dog!“  “So, pile on those mash potatoes and an extra chicken wing!“  He bellows these to the audience, but with more of a matter-of-fact talking voice, as if to say “How about that guys?“  He’s attempting to overtly turn it into more of a “story” and failing.  Sure, Neil Diamond can pull that shit off, but this guy can’t.  He’s no  Ol’ Blue Eyes-style crooner.  He’s more of an Adam Duritz type and, when showing the video to my girlfriend Kim, she thought that it reminded her of the yelped out songs by an even more emotionally inauthentic Adam: Sandler.  It didn’t help that the song that I saw them perform right before it, “Coming Back To A Man,” has an almost identical cadence to its verses, causing it to feel even more stale.

Blitzen Trapper, on the other hand, are at their best when they allow shit to get weird.  While their critics and/or Dawes fans might complain that they are unfocused, I’ve witnessed the Portland crew’s penchant of drifting into otherwise conflicting musical territories pay off handsomely and this night was no exception.  With a set sprinkled so heavily with new material, they sounded surprisingly cohesive,  while managing to make even the older work sound like it was advancing forward.  Their abilities as musicians and as a collective skilled at venturing out into heavier moments of distortion and experimentation actually work as a benefit, allowing them breathe and come to life, like they were summoning a mammoth hoof-swinging beast from the underworld.  Earley starts by crafting a foundation of solid tracks and, from there, the rest of the band can fill in the sound or help give it legs to move around.  For example, take the title track from “American Goldwing.”  It’s a good song, but it’s Marty Marquis‘ work on the keys and the little guitar riffs by Erik Menteer that contribute those perfect little accents to make it feel like a truly well-rounded effort.  Everyone in BT is extremely talented and, when it works, they operate as a unit to create beautiful tightly woven blankets of sound.

With Dawes, Goldsmith is actually weakening his own music by not recognizing where it’s strengths lie.  Trying to gain credibility for rootsy Americana while embracing more and more polished approaches to production is not serving him well artistically, even if it is doing wonders for his pocketbook.  He’d be better off playing some of that shit acoustic and not trying to work in weak arrangements with his younger brother and two other dudes, because the extra bodies actually seem to equal less life.  It’s clear that he prides himself on becoming a great singer/songwriter, but even in that respect, he’s not quite there.  It’s a tricky game, trying to tell a story about (often fictional) characters, while infusion them with powerful emotion.  Blitzen Trapper craft those type of story-based tracks, as well, and, to be honest, neither of these groups are writing “Sam Stone” or “Pancho and Lefty” quite yet.  Most artists will never ever find a lyrical voice that is as incomparable, unique, subtle, and powerful as Prine Van Zandt or contemporaries like a David Berman or Bill Callahan; it’s an incredibly rare gift to have such poetry spill out of your head and a skill that develops over time.  But that’s not really the point with BT, because the lyrical content is only one aspect to their song development, not the entire selling point.  One group is a full-on band and the other is just one guy, hoping to push a Jackson Browne vibe with a supporting cast that interact and feel more like studio musicians, even though he’s related to one of them.  The irony is that, although BT are experimenting with areas that seem like they would conflict with the Americana aspects of their sound, they actually sound a hell of a lot more organic then their co-headliners that are trying to confine themselves to that bubble.  When Earley‘s outfit launches into the space-rock or psych moments, it evokes those visuals that I’ve always imagined of the members of The Traveling Wilburys spun out on acid trips.  I’m not saying that Dawes doesn’t have a Dylanesque vibe of their own, but it’s Jakob and the Wallflowers.  They just don’t come to life off of the page for me, but that’s not saying that they won’t be successful, because I believe that they will be.

I believe that Dawes will continue to grow but, whether they become mainstream VH1 successful or simply gain some devoted fanbase that shitty bands like O.A.R. have managed to generate and maintain, I couldn’t say.  It depends on what you want out of life and your career.  Remember, The Black Eyed Peas‘ first 2 albums looked promising, with cameos by De La Soul and Mos Def, before they recruited a former Kids Incorporated/Wild Orchid songstress to piss herself live on television.  Blitzen Trapper will probably never get huge.  Most likely, the best that they could hope for would be to gradually gain a Wilco-like following in size and fervor.  Even then, I don’t see Eric Earley becoming inflicted with an actual rock-star complex.  But, for whatever my opinion’s worth, I’m actually interested in seeing what the quintet can pull off next and in delving into to American Goldwing to give it a chance.  Even if the recorded material doesn’t draw me in, I know that they are still an act that’s worth making a trip to see live.  As for Dawes?  I’m not really interested in following their careers, but for those of you who have the desire to pick up and seduce young, idealistic, upper middle-class liberal arts co-eds, you might want to start bumping their jams in your Subaru on the way to the frisbee golf course.  And, in the case that those references are outdated and are coming about a decade too late, Nothing is Wrong should still make an equally sufficient stocking stuffer for any of the soccer mom’s that those young women have turned into.

Blitzen Trapper Setlist:

Sleepytime In The Western World
Astronaut
American Goldwing
God And Suicide
My Hometown
Furr
Might Find It Cheap
Love & Hate
Fletcher
Love The Way You Walk Away
Black River Killer
Girl In A Coat
Miss Spiritual Tramp
Big Black Bird
Street Fightin’ Sun
Wild Mountain Nation

-Encore-

Fire And Fast Bullets
Good Times, Bad Times (Led Zeppelin cover)

BUILT TO SPILL

City Arts Fest 2011

The Moore Theatre

Seattle, Wa

10.21.11

I first heard Built to Spill from across the hall in the dorms.  When I lived in the dorms, I tried to keep myself off the radar.  The natural manner that my floor mates had with group dynamics made it clear that they were the fittest Darwinian specimens and that I was going extinct.  It came to a point where I, more or less, waited until I was confident that the halls were clear, before coming and going (a habit that has, unfortunately, penetrated into apartment life as well).  In the dorms, I became very skilled at dodging social interaction with the  people that I lived around.  However, some things are inescapable: things that become the air you breathe in such close quarters.  You can’t burn enough sage to satisfy the evil spirit that is the pervasive smell of Easy-Mac.  There is nothing that you can do to soften the rumble caused by charging stampedes of post-shower man-boys.  And certainly, you cannot close enough doors to dampen the constant noise of dormish this-and-thats.  Built to Spill was part of the “this and that”.

Up until recently, BTS was a sound I tried to filter out.  The guy across the hall from me—a gold medalist (to my silver) in the Awkward Olympics—had Built to Spill on repeat the entire year.  As their sound waves found their way through the tiny cracks in my particleboard door, Built to Spill became the backdrop of my dorm experience.  All that to say, I was truthfully, very excited to get the chance to see them perform at the Moore Theatre during this year’s City Arts Fest.  “Yeah great!  I’ve always wondered what they would sound like without a concrete wall between them and me.”

With my ear to my apartment door, I waited until the last rattlings of passersby had settled and then, made my way to the show.  I arrived at the theater to see five middle-aged guys on stage, all wearing loose fitting t-shirts, and either cargo pants or relaxed jeans.  I could have easily mistaken them for the road crew, if it weren’t for the ecstatic sounds radiating from everywhere in the room except for the stage.  The band enters casually and with a remarkable ease.  Built to Spill brought their living room with them, and now you are standing in it.

“Who are you, who come to me to perform in loafers?” I wonder, as they begin their set.  Before this night, I had felt strongly that shows stripped of showmanship had no place in the world.  With the soft-but-fierce competition in media, every band makes arguments and bids for your attention.  Built to Spill offers neither bells nor whistles with their set.  I am a little amazed that they have a following at all—let alone one that easily fills the Moore to capacity.  What Built to Spill gives up with showmanship, they have to make up in musicality and meaning—and that’s what people are here for.  People are clearly not at this show for a spectacle.  There is none to be had.  To quote Keanu Reeves in the blockbuster hit, Speed, “We’re just (2,436) cool dudes, hanging out.”

I begin to re-evaluate my prejudices against showless performances and start focusing on what everyone else in the room cares about: the music.  The sounds are truly elating, as they’re coaxed out of a bramble of pedals, switches and amplifiers.  The ambience of their three-guitar lineup is balanced against the very melodic, occasionally baroque-like movements in their songs—it’s an odd half-breed of shoegaze and jam band.  Even though I have very little interest in either shoegaze or jam band, the way that Built to Spill rides the line is emotive and serene.

I lost myself for a moment in the sad fanfares of Traces.  In case you didn’t know, it’s been proven that infants recognize and respond to music that their mother listened to while pregnant with them.  Subsequently, it’s been hypothesized that preference follows familiarity.  This is all to say, I feel a lot of familiarity with this song; not as if my mom, while pregnant with me, somehow listened to this song 20 years before it was recorded, but like I was indirectly informed of these sounds.  It’s possible that I may have had the seed of Built to Spill planted in my head by the rogue waves that wafted into my dorm room from across the hall.  Even more likely though, in this song, and in Built to Spill’s music in general, I hear so much of what we have come to think of as “the Northwest sound“.

The way in which frontman Doug Martsch bends his strings into a buzz of controlled chaos recalls to my mind the worbly guitars of Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica.  I listened to Modest Mouse long before BTS, but I am beginning to suspect the actual direction of the comparison: Modest Mouse sounds like Built to Spill, not visa versa.  Despite the two-year discrepancy between the formation of Built to Spill and Modest Mouse, the influence that the prior had on the latter is blaringly apparent.  Deathcab for Cutie also got swept up in the same current of contemporaries.  I can hear something like a seminal Deathcab in Built to Spill’s sprawling melodies, and even in Martsch’s voice.  There’s a fake movie I play in my head in which Ben Gibbard puts on a Built to Spill record and spends hours experimenting with just what shape he has to warp his mouth in order to make his vowels sound exactly like those of Doug Martsch.  By way of familiarity, I am becoming more and more aware that the Boise group isn’t something to shut out, as I have in days past.

By the end of the set, though, I feel a little bit like I’m back in the dorms.  Surrounded by a multitude of people who all have an intimate understanding of what’s going on, I feel lost.  Having been formally introduced to the band only recently, I don’t have any personal significance ascribed to these songs.  To these people, each song is a meaningful, personal experience that I haven’t shared.  Every song is like an encore.  Between the finish of one song and the start of the next, I am surrounded by spontaneous uniform chanting from the crowd.  It’s as if there was a program handed out at the door instructing show-goers what to drone in unison and when.  The faces of the front-rowers are elated.  I can see some not-well-concealed guy backstage who is not at all concerned with impressing his girlfriend by showing any level of dignity.  And he’s not the only one, nor is it just guys backstage.  The room is indignant and ecstatic.  The spectacle that Built to Spill isn’t creating on stage is made up for the fervor of the fans.  My appreciation for the band is far too cold and calculated—lacking all the warmth of meaningful experience—to participate.  So, as in the dorms, I’m on the outside looking in.  Bu,t unlike the dorms, it looks great.  And it doesn’t smell like Easy-Mac.

CRYSTAL CASTLES

City Arts Fest 2011

The Showbox SODO

Seattle, Wa

10.20.11

Walking into the never-ending cavern that was October‘s Crystal Castles show at the Showbox Sodo, I knew that I was a part of something outside of the realms of modern reality; something primitive and thoroughly futuristic all at once.  Everything about the experience seemed to be an oxymoron.  From the 19-year-old girls dressed like candy ravers circa-1993 to the frat dudes doing shots of Jäger in the bar, while the Crypts played their dark, thoughtful nightmare grooves, I seemed to have walked into a witches’ coven where half of the attendees were expecting a party instead of a séance.  But in fact, the mood of such a concert did land somewhere between these two ends of the spectrum. The music of Crystal Castles is smart and calculating and deeply rooted in the occult, while also appealing to the dance and party crowd, and/or those fans who revel in the collision of both dance and darkness.

Entering the stage with a sly presence, the duo wasted no time beginning with Alice Glass’ signature yelling and jumping at a hyper-momentum, set against a heavy and snail-slow techno groove, controlled by dj mastermind, Ethan Kath.  Their dynamic recalls a dancehall linguistic and a touch of The Knife with a White Magic tempo (another spooky, but more instrumental Brooklyn duo).  Crystal Castles are definitely Urban- tough (by way of Toronto), yet have an earthy fluidity.  Their set at City Art’s Fest was rooted in 90s tone with a futuristic vibration – echoeing up into rafters of a very noisy nothing, calling upon a feeling of primitive urge and uncontrollable movements…  Blood curdling drone to a backdrop of heavy rock beat that continually took the forefront and made the droning seem all that much spookier and omnipresent, as it alternated in and out of the vocal spotlight.  Three or four songs were filled with a shrieking chant that cut through the encompassing pulse, while the rest struggled with the balance between clear vocals and noise.

Much of the singing and howling that I enjoy so much in the recorded songs, was completely lost in a live setting.  I blame this solely on the venue.  I’ve only been to the Showbox Sodo three times, but every experience has the same outcome: the vocals are drowned out, the bass and feedback dominate the soundscape, and all of the details of melody and harmony drift upwards and get lost in the utter lack of acoustics in that mammoth building.  I understand that this band is on the rise and that they needed a larger venue to accommodate the demand from fans, but nobody -and I mean no decent musical act that I have seen or heard of- has ever sounded good at the Showbox Sodo!  It’s funny, because the original Showbox is, hands down, my favorite place to see live music in Seattle and the differences in atmosphere and sound quality between the two locations are so vast that I will continually pass on great bands and lineups simply because they are scheduled at the Sodo establishment.  To the credit of Crystal Castles, the energy that they projected was infectious and, even when the voices were inaudible, the crowd could sense the intent and level of enthusiasm in their performance.  Alice Glass has a stage presence like no other and, she alone, almost made up in her physicality what was lacking in the vocal and harmonic elements.

At rare moments they sounded just like the albums.  Steady, yet erratic.  Pulsating, yet spasmodic and random.  Bursts of light and jubilation, with equal parts doom and aggressive darkness.  Despite the muddled sound, the artists’ message came across and got the whole audience riled up, without a still pair of hips or feet in the building.  This tiny lady was a tinker-hellion onstage, straddling the crowd on her knees as they held her up, so that she could continue her yowling out into the madness of fan response.  These sneaky spell-casters are creating a new antithesis of disco; almost hardcore rock in a danceable format, but with something else all its own.  Dark and unreachable, they create appeal and intrigue with an aura of mystery; giving the listener just enough to grasp and keep the interest by hiding slightly in the shadows, both musically and physically.

All in all, Crystal Castles put on a great spectacle of a show, even in the poor setting and the intense silver strobe lights that threatened to either induce a seizure, or put half of the audience to sleep with its pulsing lull.  Fortunately CC’s dancey, droney brand of full-force electro-gloom kept everyone jumping along and deliriously /mysteriously happy.

ROBYN

City Arts Fest 2011

The Paramount Theatre

Seattle, Wa

10.20.11

Seeing Robyn at this year’s City Arts Fest was my first big pop concert.  I’m happy to have fulfilled this rite-of-passage;  never mind the fact I’m almost 30.  Actually, being almost 30 does relate to this story, because, as I age, the less tolerance I have for staying out late, fumbling through crowds, STANDING, and the general pack-in-as-much-as-you-can-handle model of music festivals.  EXHAUSTION =FUN?   But to see Robyn meant participating in this chaos-fest, so I bucked up, slammed a 24 oz Red Bull, packed a Snickers Charged, and practiced standing around and pushing through crowds a few weeks before the event.  Here is how it all went down:

I brought my friend Luke with me to take pictures, because my camera is old and I don’t understand hand-held technology.  First, Luke and I went to a multi-purpose events space known as FRED Wild Life Refuge to check in and get our press passes.  FRED is in a cool-looking, mid-century building that is officially described as  a “collaborative arts center.”  But I would like to call it an “all-purpose room-o-rama,” which just means that it is big and confusing.  What the fuck is an all-purpose events space supposed to be, anyway?  Or a collaborative arts center?  I’ve been inside and I still don’t know.  There are designer colors on the wall and lots of different “event areas”.  It does look really cool inside, though.

The confusing FRED provided me with the most confusing press check-in that I’ve ever experienced.  [Oh wait, I have never press “checked-in” for something.  I’ve only ever snuck around whatever event I was reviewing, feeling secretly superior, even though I paid to get in.  "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM??" I would silently scream at fellow spectators.  If only.]  There was some fiasco about what press passes Luke and I were supposed to get, what we should get, and what we would actually receive.  We ended up getting separate passes and only one was a pass for the Robyn show.  “Ummm, what?”  Rather than me braving the pop fiends alone, trying to take pictures of Robyn that didn’t look like Rothko paintings, Luke and I decided to be “punk” and sneak us both in with the non-Robyn pass that they gave us.   So, music festivals are shit-storms of chaos for press and public alike.  Oh yeah, I had already figured that would be the case.  The anxiety of the check-in was further perplexed by the fact that, after we left the check-in desk, we were kind of naturally corralled into a low-lit maze/room/foyer that housed one of the festivals rotating art shows.  This would have been cool except that we were already hecka flustered and confused and now, here we were, trying to figure out where the art was supposed to be (re:”maze”), who were art people doing art things (yikes!), who were art people just there to look at art things (get out of my way!) and who were the other dumbstruck onlookers pretending to know what to do (I know you!).   Also, there was Vitamin Water shit everywhere, which is never a good sign.  Once we found the room protrusion that acted as the gallery, we had a look around as fast as we could.  Some of the art was interesting, but vibe-wise, it was all either serious and made you feel bad or was funny and made you feel bad.  To further concentrate the aura around us, during this entire experience there was no background music and a total lack of a chattery white-noise buzz.  We had to get out of there.  So Luke and I left feeling confused, worried, and totally awkward as fuck.   But anyway, ENUF COMPLAING!!  (Not really)  ONTO THE ACTION!  (Sorta)  IT’S ALL UP HILL FROM HERE!

Because the art experience made us feel like our souls were all deconstructed and heavy, we decided we needed to rebuild our souls with alcohol.  After a few drinks and a peek at the World Series at a neighborhood bar, we felt ready to slam another Red Bull and head out.  We wandered down to the Paramount Theatre around 8:15.  The Paramount is old and fancy and is a hella classy place to see a pop diva, so things were looking up for us.  Before we approached the entrance, Luke and I did some jumping jacks and a secret handshake to increase the chances of us both getting in.  It was a little scary, but we were able to breeze right in, just by flashing the door person the weird little fabric patches that served as our passes.  Our poor ticket taker seemed blitzed and confused; they had probably just talked to 500 people in a row.  It also seems like all door people see the satin square of a press pass sticker and their eyes glaze over with approval.  Either that, or they don’t give a fuck.  If they do, they are little jerks.

When we got inside, the Portland-based dance-duo, YACHT was booming throughout the whole theater.  We went in for a quick sonic dip and caught the end of their set.  The main YACHT people, Jonah and Claire, wore grungy 90’s Euro-trash clothes and jumped around in unison.  Before the last two songs, they kept asking, “Does anyone have any questions?”  No one was stupid enough to scream out yes.

When we came back out, a ton of people were still wheeling about in the lobby/foyer/ fancy waiting-area place.  Here, we decided to engage one-on-one with fans to get the inside scoop about why they would pay shit tons of money to come here tonight.  Also, we wanted to take their pictures so you could see them.  This was a good decision because, in general, people were fucking stoked and this energy rubbed off on me and Luke.  One exception was the little hipster couple that were all slouchy and angsty and told us “Um, yeah, we are actually, like… here to see YACHT….”  REALLY?? Paying $40 to see a Portland band in Seattle is stupid, I said to them.  Not really.  But I think you and I can agree that they were stupid bummers.  Luckily, they were the only people in the whole world who felt like that.  Everyone else talked about Robyn like she was the musical version of a crisis hotline, saving them and inspiring them.  People fucking LOVED to talk about Robyn and how she is “AWESOME” and “AMAZING.”  They were dying to tell you about how HARD SHE WORKS and HOW LONG SHE has been working , how it’s SO TOTALLY NOT about the money, and that she is a dancing MACHINE.  Seriously though, Robyn’s fans really want to see Robyn get her propers.  And they should, because we are dealing with a magic Swedish pixie, tough-as-nails bird lady, who has all the cred of a class act super star, yet also seems to be perpetually skirting the actual achievement of that status.  This strange paradox of existence just further adds to her deep cred.  She is an indie diva.  That sounds terrible, but there really isn’t a better term that I can come up with right now to describe her.

One might wonder, “Why isn’t Robyn as famous as all of the other pop divas that we know and love/hate?“  The most probable answer to that is that she is not insane.  This may be because she has better genes (Swedish) or it may just be something that she tries really hard at maintaining.  Part of that effort seems to have included removing her self from the mainstream pop music machine.  You may or may not remember her first single, “Show Me Love” (it is really bad), which was put out in the 90′s when she was only like 15 or 16.  I imagine that dealing with being packaged and promoted in a particular popular musical model, while trying to grow up, was nightmarish.  (It was actually, probably, OK and really fun.)  But, after some time and some albums that had either luke-warm receptions or non-international releases, a change was a-coming for Robyn.  In 2004, the pop-star and her label severed ties, as she moved towards a more electro-dance pop vibe.  From there, she started to independently release her work on the label that she created called Konichiwa Records.  You can read all about it on her Wikipedia page and she talks about it in interviews a lot.  The complexities of international music distribution are boring and complicated and I’m not going to go into it here;  just know that this was a turning point in her career and, from this point on, Robyn started to kick major pop-ass, getting weirder and weirder.  Being cut loose from the creative confines of a major label freed her to write harder dance music, as showcased by her prolific Body Talk albums.  Doing what she loved, without some asshole dude trying to dumb it down, probably also contributes to the artist maintaining her sanity.  You can YouTube a few of her videos and see that she is a young woman who is eager to talk about the work, how hard the process has been, how rewarding, and also, how she likes to be tough.  In the video interviews that I’ve seen, she mostly refrains from that awful diva filler about how “it’s all for the fans, and I love my fans and I live for my fans blah blah blah BLARG!!!”  She simply tries really hard to make the catchy-as-fuck, sometimes-serious, music that she wants to make and, so far, she is succeeding at it.  In summation, she’s fucking cool, but don’t take my word for it; here is what some of the fans had to say:

This Canadian couple were the first fans we talked to.  Meghan started off by asking if I had ever seen Robyn before.  When I said “no” her eyes lit up like she was gonna say “OH MY SHIT! GET READY TO SEE GOD, GIRL” but actually what she said was, “She is like nothing else.  Holy shit.  She is worth traveling halfway across Canada to see. Every one sings along. It’s incredible.  I would pay 3 times the money I paid to she her.”

They travelled from Calgary.  I don’t know where that is, but is sounds FAR.  It seemed like a lot of people traveled to see her.

Lori and Daryl did not travel but they did have some cool shit to say about Robyn…

Lori:  “Dancing on my own is my anthem. I sang it at Pride Idol (last summer at Seattle Gay Pride) and people loved it.”

David and Rodrigo were on a date (maybe).  David was excited:

“It’s Rodrigo’s 1st Robyn!  I came with to show him the ways, he’s in for a real fucking treat.”

I pressed David a little more, asking about why people love her live show so much.  He said, “People have a visceral reaction.  The theatrics don’t’ overweight the music and vice versa.  She dances her ass off in a jersey for 2 and half hours!  But then she’s incredibly real and sweet as hell.”

Kathryn and Kevin said that they had “Read great things about Robyn and had to check it out.”  Kevin added, “her sister really likes her.“  WORD O MOUTH, YO.

The Tall People below are named James, Wes, Dan, and Ken. Why were they here? “Robyn. Period,” said Wes. (In other words, “it’s like, Duh!”)  He added, “She is an energy ball.”  Dan and Ken didn’t want to say anything.

While searching for other nice-looking people to interview, we ran into YACHT at their merch booth.  We hadn’t planned on interviewing them, but they were probably the most approachable and smiley musicians that we’ve ever seen manning their own merch table.  They were serious about that “ask us anything!” shit that they keep talking about between songs.  I asked them what their feelings were about playing tonight with Robyn and they said, “HUGE.”  That was a better response than what I had imagined.  We left it at that.  Then we took this sweet picture together:

The “furgirls” Leah and Erika said that “Robyn is Amazing!” and that they were here because, “LOVE KILLS!”  (That is a song title, but it still doesn’t make any sense.)

We ran into three seriously classy ladies in red who had things to say like this:

Mary (on the left): “She is great because she never let go of the dance vibe.  And It’s not about making money.“  Emmi Lyn was in the middle.  She just nodded in agreement with her friends.  It was Aileen’s birthday and she said, “I heart Robyn!“  It’s her birthday!  She doesn’t need to do any ‘splainin’!

Then we saw some Olympia people who said that they were excited.  You be the judge:

After we micro-interviewed all of our new friends, Luke and I went up to the photo pit where shit got real.  The photo pit is this aisle that is fenced off right in front of all of the foaming-mouth superfans who squish up next to each other and happily break their ribs on the safety rail.  I felt their eyes seething hatred upon our privileged shoulders.  Luckily, we were only allowed to be up there for 3 songs.  After 10 minutes of awkward waiting, Robyn finally came onto the stage.  The theater was packed and the balcony section looked CRAZY!  A roiling field of elevated dancing fools.  It was awesome.

The first song was a weird slow intro/speaky thing that basically just let everyone get all giddy with anticipation.  Dark red lights slowly went up to reveal a bunch of keyboard and drum dudes in white lab onesies.  Robyn slowly slithered out (she is so blonde!  And serious!  And tiny!  And close!) and did some roboty spoken word stuff as the song started to build.  She had weird printed spandex leggings that may or may not have been a “steam punk” print  (gears and chains and stuff) and also a boxy shirt that looked like a paper bag with stars cut in it.  Not a jersey like I was hoping for, but good for how weird it was.  If anyone can pull off a paper bag smock, it is Robyn.  She was already dancing really hard, like stomping on the ground, twirling, marching, and constantly pulling off other cool dance moves; all within only about one minute of being up there.  She further broke the ice with some comedy relief by retrieving a banana that she started to eat aggressively.  Somehow, she did this without insinuating blowjobbiness and that, my friends, is a hard balance to strike.  She was just like, “Damn, I need to eat something.  Might as well make it entertaining!” Then she busted out a couple of remedial singles like “Dancehall Queen.”   I was kind of bummed that these were the songs she was singing while we were down in the pit,but maybe it was a good thing that she refrained from the jams for those first three songs.  Photographers (which I was posing as) are not supposed to lose their shit and/or move their bodies in any rhythmic way. Not pro. Thankfully, we soon had to leave the pit and I found a cozy pillar to lean on.  Here, I relaxed and enjoyed the spectacle and weirdness of being at a big pop show.  I also felt great about not be crammed into the armpit cracks of several sweaty strangers trying to “dance.”

One thing that I’m happy to note is that, although Robyn’s vocals were definitely treated, she was really singing and she was singing damn well.  No off-key quavering bullshit here.  No pop diva with a headset whose dance moves take priority over out-of-breath vocals.  When she launched into “Dancing On My Own”, everyone started (appropriately) dancing even harder.  Everyone was definitely also singing (Meghan from Calgary doesn’t’ lie!).  It felt very posi and healthy and fun.  She busted through AT LEAST a dozen more songs that everyone LOVED without any hint of fatigue.  It was kind of crazy.  When she did mutter things into the mic in her reassuring Swedish chirp, she sounded Zen-as-shit.  She wasn’t even breathing hard!  (Robyn might be a cyborg. I think she does have a song about being a robot.)

To get back to “Dancing On My Own,” this song has some weird power about it.  The general enthusiasm, sincerity and admission of vulnerability that everyone engages in when they rave about that song, can be intense and even awkward.  Saying that you love that song is a bit like saying “I am, from time to time, a pathetic loser.”  Yet, this sentiment is ultimately neutralized with the bold understatement that all of us losers can take care of ourselves in the midst of heartache.  She made fake make-out arms with herself at some point during the evening, the gesture being funny and empowering at the same time.   See what I mean??

I didn’t stay for the whole show, knowing that she would likely be on stage for a full hour-and-a-half.  (Ow! My bones!)  But I had seen enough to know that :

a) A Robyn show is special,

and…

b.) people would be leaving here tonight also feeling special.

Special like they just partook in a day-long cleansing ritual where they divulged all of their sins and shitty-behavior and, not only got forgiven, but were given practical, real-world tips about how to be a better person.  So yeah… I just inadvertently compared Robyn to both Jesus and Scientology, but I think that you get the point.  A Robyn concert seems to be just as much about dance music as it does about basking in the glow of fellow sensitive souls who aren’t afraid to be sincere.  Even the hipster kids were dancing with their hands out of their pockets.

-Jamey BVM

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Photography by LUKE CHMURA

(check out his Vimeo page HERE)

[Utilize the Slideshow (SL) &/or Full Screen (FS) Modes for maximum viewing pleasure]

Gang Gang Dance

Neumos

Seattle, Wa

10.14.11

Let’s get this straight: “I am a total snob, a pseudo intellectual, and an occasional dilettante.”

I know this about myself.  At least I should get some Buddha points for being mindfully (if knowingly) self-aware.  I appreciate most genres of art and music.  I even admire my own openness to various genres when I’m alone with myself in my car.  I may pop in Four Tet, followed by Blossom Dearie, Elvis Perkins, Arvo Part, and Simon & Garfunkel.  Then, sometimes it’s the Black Keys, Joy division, Toumani Diabate, Ukulele Ike, Hello Seahorse, and Jurassic 5, finishing off (haha) with Guns N Roses.  The juxtapositions of my car DJ skills have me liking myself right through my morning commute.

One of my biggest snobby glitches is this: When I first hear about something, after it has already become a little too popular with the local hepsters, a wee switch goes off in my brain which keeps me secretly “above” whatever it is (at least for now).  Let’s call it snob-tourettes.  I bide my time.  I hold off until this brilliant (or not so brilliant) pop group, painter, movie, or writer passes through the imaginary threshold of popularity and into the passé; I subconsciously wait for it to be uncool enough for it to be cool enough for me…and then I sit back and take it in for the first time.  Maybe (probably) I haven’t even really paid attention to it before this.  My snob-tourettes has wrestled my tiny Buddha to the ground.

Lately, I have been openly rooting for my better self.  I do aim to grow to appreciate art on its own merits, god damn it!!  So, when an opportunity to cover the Gang Gang Dance show at Seattle‘s Neumos came, I jumped at it.  I – mostly – missed the slow swell of psychedelia that was Gang Gang Dance’s rise to international notoriety; a fact (sadly) that would usually inhibit me from listening for at least a couple of years.  This was the better-self-test that I needed; a prime opportunity to step willingly on to a popular alternative band wagon, or at least be open to it.

So, then and there, I committed to attending the show.

I prepared myself with a very limited crash course on the Manhattan music/art collective.  Some of the music was familiar to me already, but, previously, I had tried to ignore it.  So, I listened a little more, but not much better.  I watched a few youtubes.  I read the MonsterFresh.com interview.  I listened to a few songs on spotify.  I did not want to learn too much.  I definitely did not want to go to the show as a confirmed hater or a fan.  I was hoping to be genuinely converted from the live event.  I wanted to be convinced that they were worth the hype; alternatively, I wanted to be justified in shunning their popularity.

Here’s what I learned about Gang Gang Dance before the show:  The band has been termed many things: avant-garde, experimental rock, art-punk, world beat, tribal-electro-pop, & electro clash.  They tour with friend/artist/band-member Taka Imamura; he has been described as the band’s “spiritual advisor.”  They have some songs that last 11 minutes.  Okay…so definitely unconventional…and, in my mind (though I was trying not to pass judgment), they started to seem a little gimmicky(?)  I stopped my research there.

When October, 14th came, it was one of the first rainy cold nights of autumn.  It was dark by 6pm and I had trouble with even the thought of leaving my warm little house.  Attending the show didn’t feel like a good idea anymore.  Nobody really cares if I like popular alternative music.  What was I proving exactly?  I wanted to read a book in my bed, not shake it on the dance floor.  I was going, but I was not in the mood.  To top it off, the venue (Neumos) sits in the center of Seattle‘s Pike/Pine Corridor!  The show was in the middle of “Weekend Party Central” and it was Friday night!  I got into my car.  It was so rainy and so cold.  I drove.  I questioned if I’d find parking?  I thought that I might be late, I was tired, and I had limited expectations.

Then, out of nowhere, events aligned.  Is there such a thing as a divine trance-rock-fairy?  Did it give my kvetching inner humbug a smack down?  I don’t know what magic suddenly occurred, but the evening got lovely.  I found parking instantly (unbelievable prime, free, parking).  Then, I met an awesome pair of friends at the door.  I breezed through the photo pass scenario and had a drink bought for me.

Light anxiety turned to contentment.

Woosh, there I was, happy and sharing a cocktail with a friend.  My car was parked for free on a Friday night.  I had missed most of the opening band, but I would catch all of the Prince Rama set before the headliners took the stage.

Prince Rama is a sister act from Brooklyn, NY.  The band is made up of sisters, Taraka & Nimai Larson, friend Michael Collins, glitter, sequins, and an eighties jump suit.  Wikipedia states: “Originally raised on a Hare Krishna commune in Florida, and educated at an art school in Boston.”  This is the most succinct and descriptive wiki statement I have ever read, and sums up Prince Rama perfectly.  They definitely reminded me of the other kids of hippies that I grew up with.  Their performance reminded me of the haunted houses and rituals that I would invent with my childhood girlfriends.  All in all, they played tribal-psychedelia, with an earnestness of pre-teen girls or art school kids.  One of the sisters (Taraka) ended their set by chanting “trust, trust, trust…” and falling into the crowd.  They were young (20’s?) and probably deserving their own little review, but it was getting late and, by the time they left the room, I was ready to fall asleep on my feet.

At last, the members of Gang Gang Dance arrived on the stage.  They didn’t seem like they were in any hurry.  Things were being set up pretty casually. Instruments were getting their final tunings and Lizzi Bougatsos was emptying a leather bag.  Out of the bag came a small wooden, African (?) devil (?) mask.  She put the mask in front of her face all nonchalantly, like… umm… she was just checking to see if the mask still worked and as if no one was watching.  Then she took out a black bustier and tossed that down in the small pile of purse contents.  The pile contained percussion sticks, mallets, and other things that I couldn’t quite make out. “This could go either way” I thought.

The audience pressed closer together.  I stood with my hands on the stage and to Lizzi’s left.  The crowd was diverse.  A guy who was in his mid-forties and was sporting the classic ex-grunge rocker look was pushed up against my right arm.  Standing behind me was a Northwest skinny pants, horned-rims and fedora guy.  To my left a girl (barely of age) was in a new-agey-gypsy get-up swinging her arms in anticipation.

Lizzi said hello to the crowd.  She wore black gladiator heels, a black cat suit with back cut-outs and a sheer black-metallic button up with the giant tags still on it.  She said something about the Occupy Wall Street protests, which I didn’t understand completely.  When she spoke, she sounded a little like Fran Drescher (which was all that I could think of).  Then she thanked to Prince Rama and summed up my feelings about the opening band by asking sincerely, “Aren’t they cute?”  They were cute… exactly.

A series of color saturated video projections began: still, moving, and layered.  The rest of the band took their places.  Brian Degraw placed a drum stick in his mouth and laid into the keyboards.  There was a gradual spacey drone filling the room; like new age wind chimes set to heart beats.  Then the music transitioned into what sounded like traditional Arabic music.  One moment it seemed like a massage therapist soundtrack.  Next it sounded like “We built this City” by Starship.  Suddenly, the percussion kicked in from all directions (Brian Degraw on drum pads, Jesse Lee on the drum kit, and Lizzi drumming along at center stage).  The music morphed in to a tribal rite of passage.

Bougatsos’ voice was like some odd combination of Kate Bush, Cocteau Twins, and Grace Slick; with a hint of Sinead O’ Connor (from “I Am Stretched on your Grave”).  It was spacey.  It was techno.  It was hard core(?)  Wait… hold on… sometimes it was like that scene in Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood (okay, pretend you haven’t watched it, if you’re “too cool”) when the little girls are chanting around the fire with homemade tribal headdresses.  At moments the front-woman wailed, then she cooed, screeched, and sometimes she was barely audible at all.

Brian Degraw ceremoniously placed a scarf over his head like a holy man.  A large white triangle was projected onto the video screen.  The words “positive” and “energy” were visible on two sides of the projected triangle.  The image slowly rotated.  “Was I being inducted into a secret society?”  If this was a cult, then it was kinda okay by me, because the music was extremely danceable.

Taka Imamura swayed around the stage looking for things to do.  Sometimes he danced to the beat.  For a while he held (what looked like) a large tumbleweed.  He carried the tumbleweed/sculpture around the stage, placing it behind the singer’s head, walking it to different odd locations on the stage, or holding it over his own head as he negotiated the crowded stage like a cartoon shaman.  At one point, he and Lizzi held hands and casually danced through the crowd.  How many bands have a spiritual advisor on stage?  He didn’t play an instrument or sing, but it was clear that he was considered an integral component to what the group was doing as a whole.

One song became another, or there were minute pauses in between.  I tried with my limited knowledge to distinguish between them.  My sense was that, aside from the few die hard fan-geeks, it was hard for most attendees to pick out a set list.  It could have been one long song; one uniform experience: visuals, players, audio, costumes, and color palette.  I felt transported.

Taka arranged a white sheet/scrim in front of Jesse Lee’s drum kit so that the drummer’s head was barely visible and so that the projected images (which were getting denser) could take up most of the visual space on the stage.  The visuals shifted from glittery constellation objects to swaths of saturated color blended with layers of metallic video mesh.  Some of the projections were in shades of teal, fuchsia, indigo, apple green, red and white.  Colors and sound flashed together, pulsed to the music, or oozed like a lava lamp.  The room obtained a Willy Wonka ferry boat feeling.

I loved the odd sense of cohesion,  equally combined with the more experimental elements of when they didn’t seem to know what they were doing.  Near the end of the show, Josh Diamond accidently broke a guitar string.  Taka took the opportunity to grandiosely stretch that string out from the instrument; making a new electric screech as diamond played the five others that remained fully attached (I should add Lizzi joined the string pulling, as well).  The whole spectacle was both luscious and silly.  They appeared to ride the line between taking themselves way too seriously and acting as if it was all complete nonsense.  The music was solid, but the stage performance had some looseness to it.  Being goofy, bad ass, approachable, and spiritual -simultaneously- has got to be a fairly difficult task to pull off successfully

I have been trying for days, but it’s really difficult for me to relay the experience.  My mind, just sort of, flits around when I try to pin down the details.  The band’s gestation in the New York art scene might explain some of it.  Certainly, there was a flavor of performance art.  Have you ever seen footage of old Factory happenings; Beuys in his heyday, early CBGB shows, or even the Sound Lab (cultural alchemy) work coming out of the East Village in the late 90’s?  Maybe this comes from a band having spent over a decade together?  Another set of players and these components could have seemed easily like a glib spectacle, but, for Gang Gang Dance, it didn’t come across like that at all.  They seem oddly self-aware, but also raw and honest about what they were doing.

After the spectacle was over, the members of the band cleaned up their gear.  The bustier & African mask (which were never used) were put back into the oversized bag, and Lizzi Bougatsos sat at the edge of the stage.  She spoke to those that waited around.  She invited people to stay and hang out.  She sincerely thanked the fans for coming out and supporting the band.  She hugged and took pictures with those who came close.  This morning I watched an interview in which Bougatsos states that she literally picks a member of the audience, which she feels connected to, and that she sings/performs to them.  In my opinion, the success of the show was built on this sort of communion.

I went home feeling glad that I had the opportunity to attend.  My only wish was that I had spent less time thinking about it and more time letting myself go.

Gang Gang Dance has been playing larger shows and festivals lately.  This year, they performed at both the Animal Collective-curated ATP Festival in Minehead, UK and The Pitchfork Music Festival.  Growing popularity means that there may be fewer opportunities to experience the intimacy that makes this band so special.

The result of my little self-experiment is this: I learned that -yes- I am, in fact, an snob-idiot when it comes to being too concerned about what other people are and are not listening to.  The band’s current release Eye Contact is now in permanent rotation on my morning commute.  But, more than listening, I am looking forward to an opportunity to see Gang Gang Dance live once again.  I am converted and, so it seems, are the masses.  These smaller shows may soon become history and so, I encourage you to jump on this band wagon as soon as possible.  I implore you: “Shake it while you can!”

Click here to view the embedded video.

MAN MAN

City Arts Fest 2011

Pacific Science Center [laser dome]

Seattle, Wa

10.22.11

Man Man’s most recent album, Life Fantastic, was a long awaited release that saw the band making some adjustments to their sound, incorporating strings into the background, and developing a more refined sound in their production. To me -a longtime fan- these changes were (and still are) a little difficult to adjust to, but not enough to make me lose faith in the group.  The major change for me was that, for the first time, their recorded material didn’t match up to the feeling of their performances.  While the songs were still “fantastic” and held the same influences of gypsy, klesmer, and 50s music, the sound on the album lacked the pure energy that Honus Honus and the rest of his troupe pour into their live shows.  But, as I came to realize more through my last opportunity to see them perform, this may be a very positive reflection on Man Man, allowing people to see each of their two sides clearly.

The quintet’s performance at the Pacific Science Center‘s Laser Dome was unique to say the least, considering that the venue is generally intended for an audience that is either seated or lying on the floor.  Normally the space is used to project laser light shows onto the ceiling which are synced up to studio album recordings.   But even in this unusual space, the concert reflected a certain kind of inimitability that is present in all of the Philadelphia-based group’s recordings.  Man Man has always managed an impressive mixture of the chaotic with the beautiful, blending hard rhythms and harsh vocals with highly emotional and deeply resonant lyrics.  There’s a feeling of desperation, sadness, and anxiety that imbues much of their music.  Heartbreak, loss, and placelessness are common themes that give emotional weight to their songs.  Honus’ Tom Waits-style crooning fits incredibly well into both the chaotic efforts like “10 lb. Moustache“, as well as their more emotional tracks like, “Whale Bones” or “Van Helsing Boombox.”  His coarse voice breaking over notes gives an added sense of truth to the emotional content of many of these songs.  It says something incredible about a band when their raucous performances and wild style are their draw, but their most muted and haunting songs become fan favorites.

The juxtaposition of their high energy performance with the hypnotizing and peaceful laser show, was a good illustration of these two competing elements in their general musical style.  But unlike the band, who manages to combine these two aspects both subtly and artfully, the concert setting seemed inharmonious, forcing the audience to either concentrate on the physical performance or on the laser show happening above their heads.  The venue was clearly not designed for live acts, with the musicians performing between two stacks of speakers on the carpeted floor, separated from the audience by nothing but a simple strip of masking tape.  This made the band hard to see unless you were standing right up against the makeshift stage.  Honus Honus gave the rest of the audience a peak at their routine by climbing up on the speakers during some of the more wild songs, like “Haute Tropique“.  More subdued tracks, like their usual opener, “Feathers” -which also opened their sophomore release Six Demon Bag (Ace Fu, 2006)- offered good opportunities to view the laser show, since the band would be difficult to see anyway.  In these situations, the back of the room was actually the most desirable spot in the venue, providing the best view of the light show.  Before the performance began, it appeared to be a more promising scenario, overall, as everyone was seated on the floor or in the chairs.  Some people were even lying down.  It looked as if there was some general confusion as to what the situation would be for the show; whether it would be a seated event, etc.  It seems like the venue really demands that the audience remain on the floor but, unless it is explicitly stated, it feels like it would be an impossible expectation to maintain.

One advantage of the venue was that the sound quality was fantastic.  Since the main purpose of the space is for use during musical light shows, the sound really filled up the room and its dome shape made it so that, no matter where you stood, you would still be able to hear.  This really gave clarity to the other instruments and the harmonies, which the band does an incredible job of putting together.  I loved being able to appreciate the complexity of the songs without having to stand in just the right spot in the venue to get the best sound.  Since every musician in the band has an important role to play in most of their songs (other than the very minimalist songs like “Feathers”), it’s refreshing to be able to hear and appreciate the details.  Although Honus Honus gets the most recognition, each band member contributes an enormous amount.  Christopher “Pow Pow“ Powell holds down the drums in imaginative ways, while the other three members (Chang Wang, T-Moth, and Jefferson) switch between wind instruments, horns, percussion, and vocal duties, among others.  Each member of this vivacious group goes through musical acrobatics throughout every performance and it’s a shame when those efforts can’t be heard.

The concert was really gearing up with their performance of “10 Lb Moustache” when it seemed to take a strange turn.  There was applause, a pause… was this the end?  The lighting changed, but the band went ahead with “Life Fantastic.”  Was this the encore?  It seemed like too short of a set for it to already be the end.  Soon the door to the lobby opened and you could hear the blaring of fire alarms from outside.  The gypsy-influenced tune continued until the sound was cut off and the audience was herded out from the laser dome.  We were in a unique situation, since the Pacific Science Center is an enclosed complex; also including an Imax theater and a children’s museum.  Everyone was left milling around the fountain pools that take up most of the courtyard space.  No one wanted to leave, but no one knew if we’d be allowed back in.  Thankfully, it wasn’t long before Honus Honus entered the crowd with an acoustic guitar and began to sing, accompanied by Chang Wang with saxophone, Turkey Moth on the melodica, and the other 2 members quietly playing percussion and trumpet.  Along with the exiled audience, they performed an incredible rendition of “Steak Knives,” one of the most emotional and intense tracks in their songbook. “Step step, step your heart up.  Step step, stitch the holes up,” the entire crowd intoned.  Seeing several of the concert goers wading through the pools to get a better view/sound, Honus stepped in to join them, finishing the song while knee deep in the cold water.

After the singalong, the authorities instructed everyone to leave the complex, but the band hung around to take photos and talk with any stragglers.  I was able to speak to Honus briefly and he confessed to me that he had stepped into the water because he felt bad that his audience members were getting wet and cold and he wanted to stand in solidarity with them.  This kind of humble and gracious attitude towards his fans provides an extra special feeling to the group’s performances and adds a tinge of truth to the earnestness conveyed in their chaotic yet casual style.

In the end, Man Man’s concert at the Laser Dome was a perfect demonstration of both their frenzied and their melodic sides.  The insanity and confusion surrounding our evacuation from the venue seemed to match up with the energy of the harder songs in their catalog.  Perhaps, this is mostly because of the orderly way in which the crowd exited regardless of our uncertainty.  The touching acoustic rendition of “Steak Knives” worked to showcase the other extremes in their repertoire.  After intentions for an elaborate, hi-tech concert/laser show turned south, it was this simple and casual final performance that found the band deeply engaged with their audience and what, ultimately, ended the night in the most befitting of ways.
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[The next day the following footage was posted on the official Man Man facebook page from a user by the name of "Running Stills"]