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.
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