(10.12.05) While Seattle has a long-running musical festival (Bumbershoot which celebrated its 35th anniversary this year), it has always been the last fling of summer. It’s a good weekend if you’re inclined to fight for mediocre standing room only for indie pop bands, mainstream novelty acts, AOR-sponsored reunions which have been formed so that decrepit band members can make house payments and the slightly literate emo-core that passes for earnest rock these days. If you’d rather be indoors where the dance floors are tight and sweaty and the entire room can be commanded by one performer with a single laptop, you’re looking for the Decibel Festival.
In its second year, the Decibel Festival is Seattle’s bid for international recognition on the electronic music front. Ably directed by Sean Horton and a host of enthusiastic local talent, Decibel brings a welter of artists in for one-off shows collapsed into four nights of orgiastic electronic bliss. Whether it be ambient music, vanguard experimentalism, the nouveau sound of ketamine house or click-drop techno, Decibel’s effort are to electrify your brain.
There is no way to hear it all: there is up to three tracks of programming on any given night; the music starts at 6:00 PM and, if you have the endurance for it, runs until 6:00 AM. You can get beats and bliss, glitch and twitch, electro-pop and sinister walls of electro noise wallop. You can be standing next to Christian Fennesz while he enjoys a cigarette and listens to a local DJ drop vinyl all over the street corner of Pike and Broadway; you can be sitting behind the lads from Merck (who dropped a completely stellar night of IDM hip-hop on Thursday) while Pan*American layers guitar drones for a rapt room of ambient enthusiasts; you can watch Thomas Fehlmann show all of us how liquid one’s hips should be to a banging house beat. Ah, too much, too much. The following is one man’s poor attempt to record the weekend.
The first night of the festival didn’t require any heavy lifting or tough decisions. While Seattle DJs spun downtempo in the Barca lounge, Merck Records descended upon Chop Suey, a tiny little club perched on the six-way corner of Pike, Madison and 14th — aptly symbolic of the musical crossroads at which the label squats. Merck has been doing the Warp style work here in the US, though they’ve put their own stamp on the scatter-bang of IDM by infusing it with a wealth of hip-hop motion. After a brief introduction to the label DJ-style by the mysterious “DJ Merck,” Deceptikon took the stage for the first show of Decibel 2005.
It might be a heavy onus to bear — the first knob-twiddler of several dozen to cozen up to arched eyebrows of a skeptical audience (believe me, they’re all skeptical until midnight) — but Zack Wright (a.k.a. Deceptikon) isn’t a stranger to pressure. Winner of the first Portland, OR, Laptop Battle in 2004, Wright hits the stage without pause and lays into a stuttering hip-hop rhythm, a click-stop pulse of popping drums. Melodies, little tenuous things, begin to grow out of his rhythms and try to find purchase in the hard floor where they can twist about the legs of the audience like aggressive kudzu vines. Near me, a transvestite in 3″ lifts shrugs and sways to the beat while the indie crowd, flush with that feigned 9:00 PM indifference, hang back by the bar, oblivious. The floor fills slowly as people find a hook that pleases them, a syncopated rhythm that captures their systolic murmur, and they drift closer to find a spot to take root on the floor and start swaying to the music. The video screen flashes bands of color — red, green, yellow — like Portland Street neon in Mong Kok, Hong Kong (done by The Now Device, who are consistently mesmerizing all weekend).
When the vocals drop in, a half hour into Deceptikon‘s slick set, the lower end starts vibrating my coccyx. A little dash of downtempo in the music snaps the crowd’s attention and their heads — unconsciously for some — begin to nod. It’s becoming a room full of receptive bobble-heads. Christ, I’m even thinking of shaking my ass, and it’s only the first act of the weekend — hell, it’s hasn’t even been an hour since we’ve gotten under way. Deceptikon goes for sonic compression at the end of his set, bringing all his lazy beats into a tight embrace and then, in a decisive motion, he slaps his laptop closed. Two seconds later, the machine cuts the signal and it’s like our lifeline has been summarily severed.
Deru takes the stage next. Of the four Merck lads, his set is the one I was anticipating the most, having gone all google-eyed about his record a few months ago, and he doesn’t disappoint. Filled with physical funk, Deru takes the hard wallop of Deceptikon‘s opening statement and drowns it, submerging the taut kick drum until it starts to get soft around the edges. I find myself surrounded by people doing the IDM version of the Grateful Dead dance, all floaty arm and Dervish eyeballs rolling back in their heads. My gum is stale but I can’t stop chewing it, my jaw caught up in the liquid wave of Deru‘s rhythms. Glass bottles and rain drops provide a percussive melody — a chirping skipping rain bird that chatters over the — eh, the metaphor I’m reaching for dies under my pen as marimbas start glissading around the glass chirps. The floor is half full now; the groove has landed.
The visuals are running images of giant transformer coils. The transvestite is doing a slow vogue and two guys behind him/her are flopping about like Dawn of the Dead zombies getting zapped by household current, their arms twitching loosely. It’s more than a little surreal. The four people next to me have blissed out as Deru slides into an ocean wave mix, the swells rising and falling behind the hollow clatter of the blunted beat. A woman in long ponytails and a black beret sweeps onto the floor and breaks into a dance that matches the skating chipmunk beat. IDM is not only alive and well, but people have figured out how to dance to it. (I should have paid more attention in that modern dance class I took back in college.) One of the bliss seekers can no longer sit still. Nirvana has infused her spine and made her roll with liquid funk. Beside her, Zombie Guy A’s has started to slip Tai Chi moves in his repertoire. (Something else that would have come in handy to have bothered to remember from my college days. These are the skills you need to survive the dance floor at an IDM show.)
Deru climaxes with an aquatic sequence: filled with sonar pings, submarine echoes and lots of hot steam bubbling up from the deep that gurgles and shakes as it passes. A woman’s voice hits the room like an active sonar query, a 100-ton query of loneliness: “Are you there?” She can’t hear the sound of our feet in reply because we are all duck-walking, high-stepping, toe-tapping and limbo’ing around with the lightest of touches. As ocean spray fills the video screens, Deru strips away all the layers until only the lonely cry of the spectral woman remains, a single gull riding upon the massive swell of the sea.
Travis Stewart a.k.a. Machine Drum has an old-school setup: an ancient CRT monitor attached to his equipment that probably weighs more than he does. Stewart’s other archaic instrument is a microphone lifted from a old jazz lounge, a silver thing with shutters on its face that he runs through twenty or so filters to turn his voice into a shrieking howl of sound. He flushes the mood in the room by opening with a few minutes of noise, Merzbow-style. His scatterburst opening of shrieks and howls is a palette cleanser, a wash of sound meant to overflow our buffers and reboot us to the next round of stalky stabby hip-hop. Stewart (and his numerous pseudonyms) is patient zero for the infectious Merck sound; it is his urban biology which has cross-pollinated slick urban hip-hop with scatter gun IDM beats.
Tonight, he’s working his home grown vocals, his filters turning his voice into synth stabs. The vocal delays begin to sound like a cloud of approaching locusts, the massive thrum of a million wings oppressing the humid atmosphere of the club. When the dancehall number hits, I realize that Stewart is essentially playing a very chaotic home-grown karaoke machine as he cavorts and spits into his microphone in concert with the pre-rigged vocal track. This is scatter-hop for the methamphetamine MCs in the house.
Unlike the other beat-bashers, Machine Drum comes with a touch of feedback, a snarling static that keeps threatening to get away from him. The most chaotic of all the Merck performers, Machine Drum‘s set lurches and bellows with random belligerence, and butterflies all over the world are dying from the fluctuations he injects into the chaotic fabric of the universe.
The night ends with Proem, whose Burn Plate No. 1 years ago on Hydrant Records got him noticed and his successive records on Merck (and other labels) has garnered him a wealth of attention for his inventive and detailed programming. After the auto de fe chaos of Machine Drum, Proem‘s set is liquid smooth. The evolution of his melodies and beats is an organic structure, a seamless branching from one state to another as elements attach themselves to the mix and fade again as their life spans expire. A gorgeous note is sustained forever and entire civilizations of beats and rhythms live and die beneath this endless note. His music is rich and brittle, filled with textures that have had all their sharp edges smoothed off.
The monitors dissolve from snow-scapes to verdant landscapes of red fall leaves while Proem washes the club with a deep wave of sound. The chaos of Machine Drum is traded in for a complex continual web of rhythm. It’s the comedown, the return to earth from the low orbit we’ve all ascended to from the energy generated by the previous laptop magicians, and falling back to the ground is such sweet collapse.
Following the Festival, Merck announces plans to cease production with the release of their fiftieth CD (sometime in 2006). All their releases will be deleted and the label will vanish. This is news in the future, a tiny detail which would have indelibly colored my experience of the evening if I had known. The news does make me more than a little sad (though, I’m completely aware of the effort that goes into running a label and can’t blame anyone involved for wanting to take a brake), but it makes the experience of seeing a “Merck Showcase” all the sweeter. Deceptikon, Deru, Machine Drum and Proem will all find other labels eager to release their works; it’s just been really nice that they’ve had a home that has allowed them to flourish so gracefully. Then, and now, I still see this night as the consistently best showcase of the festival.
Great job, guys, and good luck.
