4.16.2009, Flying Lotus/Brainfeeder NYC

Tufts Daily

Former New York Yankee pitcher David Wells wrote of pitching in Yankee Stadium, “I can’t begin to adequately tell you how thrilled I am just standing here on this little clay hill, knowing that I’m once again a small part of this incredible tradition.”

I will never be a professional baseball player, I hate the Yankees, and I’m at least 300 pounds lighter than David Wells, so I hesitate to say that I relate. Nonetheless, Boomer pretty much summed up how I felt walking into Manhattan’s Club Love for Brainfeeder NYC, a buffet of performances by some of the most imaginative electronic musicians in the world right now.

The bill—Pursuit Grooves, Mike Slott, Ras_G, Martyn, Kode 9, and Flying Lotus—reads both like a list of my favorite producers and a well-curated sampling of the sounds feeding into this nameless, decentralized movement taking place in electronic music right now. People around the world are experimenting with new sounds, cobbling together bits of dubstep, grime, hip hop, techno, psychedelia, tropicalia, and noise into self-referential music that doesn’t really sound like anything else.

I would have driven to a New Jersey Denny’s to see all of these musicians in one place, but hosting the show at Love, a room that boasts what many consider to be the best soundsystem in the US, is like soaking a James Cameron film in epic juice, then showing it to whole world by projecting it on the moon. This show was going to be a snapshot of contemporary international electronica, a Big Deal [please keep], and I was ready to watch history unfolded.

The de facto posterboy for this sound has to be Flying Lotus, who at 23 has already turned much of the existing musical landscape into his own unified, genreless vision. Regardless of whether you like the music, the most obvious quality upon hearing a Flying Lotus track—nearly any of them, but especially those from Los Angeles (2008)—is his skill.

It’s kind of like Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez: love him or hate him, there’s no denying how good he is. FlyLo can make sound palpable, blending different kinds of music together into satin-smooth, body-knocking sound that requires skill and nuance beyond most people’s capacity. You don’t have to like how it sounds to get this, but in case its not grotesquely obvious, I happen to very much like the way it sounds.

So, I’m standing at the epicenter of electronica, seeing the visionary human embodiment of modern music surrounded by other trailblazing musicians, all performing on an internationally renown soundsystem. Big Deal here I come!

Maybe it was my Everest-ian expectations, but his set was tame. Everything, except for maybe the two ill-advised housey tracks towards the end, sounded excellent, as FlyLo showed off the quickfire Trigger Finger-based mixing technique he has perfected and the many sounds of contemporary electronica he has helped pioneer. Nonetheless, it also all sounded dryly familiar. His mix prominently featured all kinds of older standards like “$tunt$,” “Shadows,” and his “A Milli,” and while his standards are all dope, it was a little disappointing to see what basically was a normal FlyLo set when the stars were fully aligned for a truly historic performance.

At one point, though, FlyLo grabbed the mic and said, “This is a track I made yesterday for y’all,” dropping into a gloomily textured but inescapably pounding beat smacking of equal parts J Dilla and Burial. To me, that’s the coolest kind of thing anyone is doing in music right now, and no one can quite as good as Flying Lotus. His set at Love did nothing to change my mind about that, but it does seem that I’ll have to go to Yankee Stadium to know what David Wells meant.

4.10.2009, Parts & Labor

Tufts Daily

Jay Leno is retiring in a little over a month, and when he writes his memoirs, I suspect he will write something along the lines of, “Michael Jackson’s fall from grace was the best thing that ever happened to me.” That whole circus, with its accessibility, crude physical humor, and generally broad appeal, is the kind of material that mainstream comedians pray for at least once a day, because its easy to joke about and everyone likes to laughat the rich. That’s why, for like two years, every Jay Leno joke went out of its way to reference moonwalking; not because it was funny, but because it was easy.

            To a live music writer, the takeover of Oxfam Café by Tufts Students Resources (TSR), who will turn the non-profit, charity café into a for-profit eatery, is akin to the Michael Jackson Saga for a mainstream comedian. This is a music columnist’s dream. The Man ruining a perfectly good art-space by turning it into a cash cow? Yes please! Greed wins again, isn’t anything sacred, (sob), just wait until I put this in my Live Journal, craft a smug Tweet, and talk about it with my friends at the faux-Marxist co-op where I live, etc.

            This line of thinking is simplistic, reductive, and flawed; more money will probably mean, among other things, more resources to invest in making a comfortable atmosphere and better audio production. I think it’s hard for anyone in the Tufts community to argue against that.

            Nonetheless, as I stood in the back of the café during Brooklyn band Parts & Labor’s ferociously incredible set, I couldn’t help but get swept in a wistful trip to cliché land. Would this kind of show or any of the dozens like it that I have been lucky enough to see in this dingy basement still be possible when the people running the café no longer give a rats ass about it?

            I’ve seen deafeningly loud, sardines-in-a-tin-can crowded shows by huge acts like Ratatat and Man Man, a sweaty rave with a bill that included Daedelus two days before he appeared on the cover of XLR8R Magazine, and hauntingly intimate performances by reclusive legend Phil Elverum from the Microphones. All of these nights are among my favorite memories at Tufts, and there is literally nowhere else on campus that could have hosted those shows and had them still be fun.

At Tufts, concerts either happen at Dewick—where there are as many TUPD officers as people in the audience, the music sounds like its coming from a set of iPod speakers, and the power-tripping Concert Board volunteers are too busy brownnosing the performer to pay attention to the crowd—or Hotung, where the band competes with the TV for attention.

Seeing and feeling Parts & Labor’s songs in an atmosphere rooted in community and social activism, I realized that, as much as I hate to admit it, the simplistic faux-Marxist tweeter may have a point. If, as I suspect, the TSR takeover will mean the head-spinning Tufts bureaucracy will exercise more control over Oxfam and the concerts they host, there might not be anywhere else on campus for performances as meaningful and powerful as P&L’s, Man Man’s, or Phil Elverum’s.

Don’t misunderstand me—I’ll gladly and repeatedly see Ghostface in Dewick. But for me, Oxfam filled a huge void in the Tufts community, giving interesting people within and outside of the community a place to see and hear quality live music. This year’s head of booking Kelly Duroncelet told me that she “likes to give people a chance to open up for people they normally would never have the opportunity to if it were any other place.” I hope—but doubt—that this is something TSR will eventually understand.

           

            

4.2.2009, Brian Jonestown Massacre

Tufts Daily

As far as I’m concerned, the best part about the Brian Jonestown Massacre is the chaos. Sure they’re a fine band and all—their music is cohesive, well-produced, mildly psychedelic but still approachable—but its not like they’re light years beyond their peers or anything. BJM are a good band and there’s definitely nothing wrong with them, but that’s about as laudatory as I’d get with their music.

            From a group-dynamic perspective, though, no one really does it like BJM, at least outside of Ricki Lake Show outtakes on the UPN network. To put it bluntly, these guys are volatile, in a terrifying, amusing, oddly gratifying kind of way. It really seems like they hate each other with the fiercest, most unbridled passion imaginable, and yet here they are, almost 15 years after the release of their first LP and still headlining shows at big venues in major markets.

            Although to be fair, this isn’t the same band as the one that released Methodrone all those years ago. Through his own general unpleasantness, singer, lead guitarist and all-around asshole extraordinaire Anton Newcombe has upset, threatened, or actively assaulted 22 former band members into leaving BJM, changing personnel quicker than General Motors.

This is a guy who got arrested for kicking one of his own fans in the head. He once tried to fight his whole band while onstage with them…all of them. In 1991, when a reporter tried to compare him to Eric Clapton, Newcombe wondered, aloud and to a member of the press, “What the fuck has Eric Clapton ever done except throw his baby off a fucking ledge and write a song about it?” This is not a nice man.

Nonetheless, it certainly makes seeing them more exciting. Is Anton Newcombe going to refer to me as “the posterboy for legalized abortion,” which he has said in the past about other musicians, or ruin his career by instigating a drunken punchup in front of the major label A&R’s who want to pay him to make music, which he also has done in the past? I don’t know, but the only reason I went to see his band last week was to find out what uniquely self-destructive antic he and BJM would enact before my very eyes.

I was, to say the least, disappointed that instead of threatening or belittling their fans with the aggression of someone with severe emotional problems, BJM professionally and amicably charged through nearly 25 songs from their good-not-great, totally inoffensive-but-not-that-inspiring catalog.

Songs like “Got My Eye On You,” “Nailing Honey to The Bee,” and “Oh Lord” show off the rockabilly/psychedelic/alt-rock/alt-country sounds that the band have done so unremarkably since the early 1990’s. It’s totally fine—with little variation, BJM make the kind of guitar-driven, risk-free music that white people have been making on a pretty regular basis for a few decades now, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Still, it isn’t worth my T-fare. Hearing outlandishly degrading heckles from a man who, at any moment, could throw a tambourine at me, his drummer, or his grandmother, would have been more than worth my time and money. Nobody antagonizes their associates or supporters quite like BJM, and nobody deserves a public collapse more than Anton Newcombe, and it would have made me very happy to see his train crash, even if it was into me. 

3.21.2009, the Boston Massacre v. the Charm City Roller Girls

Tufts Daily

There are two ways to look at the “live music” heard at the Boston Derby Games’ first bout of the 2009 season. One would be to write about the band that played at halftime—I forget their name, but it was something like I Hate My Dad: FEEL MY ANGST. The problem with this approach is that it’s a dead-end. IHMD:FMA’s show was the most painfully unlistenable thing in recent memory, and that’s pretty much the end of that thought. So, yeah, how ‘bout the weather?

            No, the second approach—writing about the fantastic playlist jumping out of the speakers at the Wilmington Shriners Auditorium—is much more promising, if only because it segues nicely into something I’ve been thinking about recently: if I were a major league baseball player, what ten seconds of music would play in my home stadium as I walked to the batter’s box?

            Every baseball fan thinks about this year-round, and for most of the year, we have slews of goofy answers. Last summer, I remember hearing rollicking, side-splitting responses of true comedic genius, like “Why Can’t We be Friends?” and the unintentionally hilarious “Something by Afroman, bro!” But before summer sets in, as April and Opening Day draw nearer, the committed fan approaches this question with a little more commitment.

The season is promising, and as the players approach the headspace necessary to run around in stifling temperatures for 6 interminable months, the fan needs get ready to help their team in the best way he or she knows how: to sit there and watch it—all of it—with the sad obsession of someone who loves watching other people play sports.

But sports obsession isn’t the point—the point is that people who are obsessed are impelled to have a legitimate answer to this question. Why is this seen as important? Why—aside from the fact that we are lame—do baseball fans spend springs pouring over this question? There are dozens of explanations, but for me, the biggest reason (and the link to the roller derby) is because music can help define sport.

This is a straightforward idea. Music is so pervasive in normal human experiences that we usually don’t even notice it any more—if you want to get sick, do a little reading on the ways that malls use ambient background music to trick you into buying things.

With sports, though, it’s different. It varies, but music usually serves not as a backdrop to the action but (at least part of) the action itself. When a batter heads to the plate, there is nothing else for fans to pay attention to except his 10-second audio snippet. While the dentist can just plug some smooth cheese into the speakers to distract you from your root canal, the baseball player has 10 seconds to distract people, get fired up, and in part define himself as an athlete. Better make it count.

One of the many achievements of the first Boston Derby Games was putting together a playlist that both reflected and expanded the sports unique aesthetic, Warped Tour rejects notwithstanding. While empowered women zoomed around a flat oval, slamming and lead-jamming each other into lovely pulps, playful, occasionally tongue-in-cheek, but aggressive selections like MC5’s “Kick out the Jams” and a blur of Black Sabbath songs blared in a endless, perfect complement to the action. Even better was when Boston DJ John Barera spun records—King Geedorah, Prince, A-Trak—that broadened the traditional roller derby sound, reminding people that partying and booze was part-and-parcel with the sport’s aesthetic.

One of my biggest regrets about graduating is that I am jut now getting into Boston Roller Derby. I could write pages on why—the empowerment, the spectacle, the sense of humor that runs through the sport—but really, I just like how the sport sounds.

3.07.2009, Sound Tribe Sector 9

When I first saw STS9, I was 16 and they were a thought-provoking, ludicrously skilled, highly energetic band with a small but committed following of warm, interesting people. Their music dipped and swelled, generating tension and then releasing it in a haze of live drum and bass, organic electronica, and rhythmically enveloping music that I don’t think anyone else has or can really match. Its pointless to try to describe what my first several shows meant to me, and I’ll probably never have the vocabulary or syntax to convey the ipmact that that music and community had and has had on my development. Just know that they were important.

            Thankfully, I’ve changed a lot since I was 16. I’m not saying I wasn’t the man in 10^th grade—I totally was, I’ve just gotten a lot of cool clothes since then that I can’t imagine living without now. Predictably, my life is a lot different now than it was then, and I’m confident that I am a deeper, generally better person than I was at my first STS9 show.

            I can’t say that about the band. Since I first saw them almost five and a half years ago, the quintet and their music have “evolved” from probingly intense organic electronica to a kind of futuristic, prog-arena electro-hip-hop with the emotional and spiritual depth of an Oprah rerun. For the last nine months, I’ve been falling in and out of favor with this new incantation of STS9, and the last of three shows in Oregon this weekend may have been the nail in my personal fandom coffin.

            While Thursday’s show in Eugene and Friday’s show in Portland generously blended together old, current, and brand-new sounds showcasing much of the band’s 10+-year career, Saturday’s Portland show was all about showing off the grandiose electronica sound STS9 began crafting with 2005’s ArtiFact and culminating in last summer’s Peaceblaster and this fall’s mini-tour of scaled down PA performances.

            In 2003, STS9 were playing songs inspired by Mayan mythology on stages decorated with crystals, channeling the collective effervescence of a passionate fanbase that followed them around the country. On Saturday, as has been the overwhelming rule for the last 18 months, they churned out bombastic electro banger after banger, doing everything possible to make Portland dance, emotions and spiritually be damned.

            And the mission was more than accomplished. Epic, melodically towering songs like “Be Nice” and uptempo, low-end-driven prog-techno songs like “Shock Doctrine” and “Lo Swaga” made people’s bodies do uproarious things all night long. It looked like my first show, where everyone in the audience seemed to subconsciously synchronize his/her body to the rhythms coming from the stage, anticipating peerless drummer Zach Velmer’s rhythmic shifts and downbeats and pulsing to bassist David Murphy’s warm tone. That kind of communion—between audience members, between the crowd and the band, and between the bandmates themselves—was what made seeing STS9 such an exuberant experience for me.

            That doesn’t really happen any more, for two reasons. The first, and I say this knowing how condescending this is going to sound, is the audience itself. I realize that STS9 crowds didn’t use to be cultural melting pots, but I haven’t been anywhere that has matched the positivity and unity of crowds at places like Mississippi Nights in 2004 or even the Higher Ground in 2006. And yes, there were a lot of white people with dreadlocks who really missed Phish, but there were also a lot of relatively clean cut hip-hop heads, bluegrass fans, and ravers who sought the energy that STS9 cultivated and shared.

            In Portland, and elsewhere for at least the last 18 months, the STS9 demographic has changed to replace a lot of the seekers—dreaded or not—with a bizarre breed of thugged-out quasi-hippie scenesters that put as much time into their wardrobe as they do to listening to STS9. A kid, wearing stunna shades, a Billionaire Boys Club trackjacket, and (get this) a Bob Marley flag as a kind of kafia, stumbled over to me with his identical friend and asked, “Yo homie, Are you thizzzzin’ tonight?” While I appreciated the Mac Dre reference, I did not appreciate the shallow, party-first attitude that this poser and people like him brought to the STS9 community. It was clear that I would not be talking to this boy about Mayan mythology.

But the bigger problem, I think, isn’t the crowd but the music. As the band’s tastes and music have shifted from atmospheric drum and bass and downtempo IDM to epic club bangers, their fanbase has largely shifted from those seeking to be illuminated and touched to those looking to rage really hard. There’s nothing wrong with this—I like to rage really hard, and with songs like “Heavy” and “The Unquestionable Supremacy of Nature,” STS9 proved that they can provide the musical accompaniment to that ambitious goal.

But I can rage anywhere. What saddens me about Saturday’s show and what will keep me away from STS9 for a while is that they no longer seem interested in pursuing the emotional and spiritual dynamism that I and so many others found in their performance. As they indicated during the weekend, it is still possible to get lost in the bright ebullience of “Circus” or to touch the ineffable in “Jebez,” but those achievements are rare. I used to think the only part of being 16 that I missed was the carefree humid summers of a kid with a car and no obligations. Saturday in Portland added “STS9 as I know it” to the short list. 

3.08.09, Joe Nice

Tufts Daily

One of the most amusing parts of next-level, forward-thinking electronic music is how eerily similar it seems to the most soulless and derivative sectors of social life. In some ways, cutting-edge music encourages and constitutes the new ideas that eventually blossom into new ways of living. In others, though, it would be difficult to distinguish the arrangements and mentalities of progressive electronic music culture from those “evolving” at a Hot Topic-sponsored lecture series featuring Kathy Griffin, Kevin Federline, and Vincent Gallo, with keynote address by Bono and a closing haiku by Ashton Kutcher,

            Take fame and status for example. The mainstream popular culture pantheon very often features people whose fame is absurdly inexplicable. Beyond annoying people who are in the public eye, I mean people who aren’t famous for doing anything valuable or even remarkable; they’re just famous. Somehow, through no amount of talent, charm, or contribution of any kind, people like Paris Hilton, Ryan Seacrest, and Simon Cowell matter to the American public. No one knows why, but the cultural chorus just echoes, “Here they are—household names. Remember these.”

             In some ways, electronic music that defies the generic, thoughtless, stale culture from which Ryan Seacrest derives his vapid powers (and swimming pool of gold dubloons) is fueled by the same arrangements that make Paris Hilton cool. How is it, for example, that Baltimore DJ Joe Nice has turned himself into the most important person in stateside dubstep?

He’s not a producer, he’s not a journalist, and he doesn’t have a label, and yet he is, bar-none, the most influential American in dubstep. For almost five years he has irrefutably been the US’s ultimate arbiter of England’s newest musical export. He has first dibs on the coolest, newest records in the world and a VIP pass to virtually any club with a good enough soundsystem to handle his decimating sub-bass sounds, and all he does is play other people’s music. Kind of similar to Paris Hilton, right? Seems weird, right?

Well, no.  For one thing, Joe Nice is the smoothest, classiest, nicest person on the planet, while Paris Hilton is a whoring dog. But more importantly, Joe Nice’s rise to fame is due in large part to an unbelievably refined ear, impeccable skills as a DJ, and a fierce passion for the music matched only by my contempt for Hugh Grant. The difference, essentially, between perplexingly relevant members of the popular culture canon and taste-making future-music kingpins like Joe Nice and British counterpart Mary Anne Hobbes is that while Paris Hilton can make a B-rate porno, Joe Nice can put on an explosive, rattling, indescribable show like the one in Portland this late Saturday night.

I think I could see Joe Nice spin records with the sound off. He has so much charisma onstage and he’s so meticulous about how he handles his records—how clean they are, how gently he returns them to his crate—that its almost inspiring to simply observe a musician that passionate about what he or she is doing.

That said, the music was jaw-dropping. Berbati’s Pan doesn’t have the best bass in the world, but it was adequate to deliver the synthy wonk of Joker’s “Digidesign” and the crushing, Rick Rubin-sampling wobble of Jakes’ “Rock Tha Bells” with sufficient force. Effortlessly mixing an array of distinct cuts from across the genre—many of them brand new and unreleased—Joe Nice showed off the skill, knowledge, and influence that make him a crucial figure in dubstep worldwide. On paper, it may not seem like he does much, but his set of skills prime him to shape and share some of the most exciting music in the world, a feat that, as far as I’m concerned, is more than worthy of celebrity status. 

2.28.2009, The Disco Biscuits

Tufts Daily

In the past I’ve voiced my ruthless contempt for Hugh Grant, who is the single-most annoying person in film not named Ben Stiller. However, I’ll have it known that close behind on my Hollywood hit list is John Cusack, who is every bit as sniveling and charmingly/pathetically puppy-like as his British counterpart but who nonetheless has one redeeming achievement: “High Fidelity.”

             In one of this opuses’ many nuggets of sage-like analysis, Cusack tells Laura—with eyes in full-on canine effect—that she can’t simultaneously like both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and that doing so would be such an egregious trespass that she might as well claim to support both the Palestinians and the Israelis. I realize it’s funnier when he says it, but that’s not the point.

The point is that I totally understand, because when I was 16, I fell in love with the band STS9 at a time when or in a culture where doing so meant that you almost categorically couldn’t like the Disco Biscuits.

Looking back, the dichotomy was absurd. I can understand siding with one side in some kind of tiff—Van Halen against David Lee Roth or Jay Farrar against Jeff Tweedy—out of personal loyalty to one party. But siding with one congenial band over another band that shares obvious aesthetic and cultural similarities seems not only stupid and pointless, but counterproductive.

Nonetheless, the beef was there, and the handful of times I’ve given the unfortunately nicknamed Bisco a chance to win me over, they’ve failed badly. I may have been slightly predisposed to dislike them, but their music always seemed too repetitive, too indulgent, and too shallow. They seemed to self-servingly mess around on their instruments for way too long, trying to get to a crescendo so it would seem like they were doing something impressive, and occasionally chanting the most god-awful lead vocals this side of Creed.

Maybe it was because I realized the absurdity of the Bisco/STS9 rift. Or maybe it was because STS9 has hit a creative dry spell over the last 12 months and I need something to fill the gap until they get their swagger back. Whatever the reason, I felt oddly impelled to see Bisco in Boston last weekend. Even more baffling than my desire to see this poorly named group of jamming, solo-happy, bad-singing Philadelphians, though, was how much I actually enjoyed it.

To be clear, I wasn’t blown away. But whereas my negativity towards the Disco Biscuits used to center around my philosophical aversion to their noodling, mindless melodies and unrelentingly untz-y rhythms, I left the House of Blues with a much less damning thought: maybe Bisco simply isn’t my kind of thing.

Drummer Allen Aucoin seems to have meshed with the band since I last saw them, and he has elevated his play beyond the endless house/techno untz that I had grown accustomed to. More importantly, though, what I once viewed as unabashed instrumental wankery felt a lot more legitimate and inspired, particularly in the second set.

During sections in songs like “Run Like Hell” and “Shelby Rose,” they didn’t wank as much jam in well-integrated, highly cooperative melodies. Their improvisations actually made sense, and I finally saw why so many of my friends think Jon Gutwillig is an elite guitarist. Dude can shred—no two ways about it. I may not like his style of playing but I can’t deny that he does some incredible things.

I will probably never like the Disco Biscuits—their music is too melodious, too peppy, too carefree in a patchouli-scented kind of way for my personal tastes—but after seeing and enjoying them free of whatever asinine fetters I have accrued over the years, I can at least say that I wish I had found this out earlier.