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General Purpose Audio Consumption ::
El Tour De Los Guapos from Schematic Records featuring a few of the Miami label’s heavyweights and a couple new faces recently rolled through Los Angeles.
DJ Aura started out the evening and filled the gaps between artists throughout the night. Selecting tracks ranging from up-tempo techno to breakbeat/brokenbeat to classic IDM. Venetian Snares was in there (but then again, who was the last DJ who didn’t drop in V-Snares), some stuff that sounded like it came from the Paradigm Shift compilation on Nettwerk, and some melodic but danceable IDM a la Merck or n5MD. Nothing disastrous, nothing earth shattering either.
Nick Forte was first up. I’d heard his debut CD for Schematic only once or twice entitled Pasted Lakes, and it left me thinking that the songs were under-developed demo versions of Richard Devine tracks; I was hoping it might come across better live, so I gave him a chance.
Bucking the trend, Nick planted himself on stage sans laptop, but rather with a guitar and quite an impressive assortment of little black boxes with many knobs. He started plucking notes on his guitar which was highly processed -sometimes reaching frequencies lower than a standard bass guitar, other times sounding more like a traditional guitar, but always with enough delay and reverb to make Robert Smith jealous. In fact, a lot of the textures he used reminded me quite a lot of The Cure circa Pornography or Disintegration. That might sound like a compliment. It isn’t. Whereas the Cure’s textures seemed to serve more of a purpose and to fit the style of that band, Nick’s canyon-sized reverbs made the whole mix a muddy mess, and it came across that he was just fiddling around with sounds and not attempting to play cohesive noise. The loops were similar to the Logghi Barroghi Scorn period, which again might sound like a compliment, but the guitar/delay noodling sounded directionless.
Otto Von Schirach next: the master goofball of glitch-soaked hip hop. I’ve heard the argument that IDM is much too pretentious and serious and could use a nice big injection of lightheartedness. For those people, OVS certainly fits the bill, hitting the stage in a Mexican poncho, a big curly wig, and silly attitude. Some might think that the buffoonery works to his detriment. Musically, he’s got some pretty good material with some wicked beats, but it would serve him well to lose all the tomfoolery. The crowd seemed too really enjoy him, though. And it was during Otto’s set that the loft seemed most populated.
Phoenecia next: Phoenecia has presented us with some downright legendary sets (the blistering 2+ hours at the Pet Store in Silverlake, CA.) as well as some total yawn-fests (the Knitting Factory), and tonight’s set certainly lands between those, but more than anything else it was just plain inconsistent. They’ve obviously been bitten by the 
minimal-techno-with-no-bass-line-or-melody bug which consumed the overall effect of their set. Sounding similar to Plastikman or Error Smith, they would start a loop, and delicately shift hi-hat patterns or other rhythmic accents, but no song or identifiable melody took shape.
The majority of the crowd seemed not too thrilled with the sounds either. There was a palatable sense that the club-goers were ready to assault the dance-floor and start shakin’, but the music inspired little dancing. For the most part, people just stood with arms folded, chatted with friends, or went for a smoke break while a limited few actually danced to the beats. At one point, they did do a section toward the middle of their set which had a good punch to it, but that proved to be the exception in an otherwise totally shoe-gazzing set of minimal techno.
The sole highlight of the night was Richard Devine. It’s too bad he went on so late (2AM), because by then the crowd had been cut in half. Those of us who staved off sleep were rewarded, though, as Richie just about flattened the place, his music sounding something like one of those old-fashioned coal-burning steam-powered freight trains barreling through at 300 MPH. And in actuality, I think he’s toned down his sound just a fraction because it wasn’t as abusive as the pummeling sets he threw at us at Warp:Nesh and at Sugar. Still, the adrenaline overdose of hard, speedy beats, a healthy dose of glitch noise and barrage after barrage of machine-gun sounds seemed to recharge everybody’s batteries -what people were left at the show anyway. A thought repeatedly crosses my mind concerning Richie’s music, though; it sure would be great if he would introduce a bass line or a melody in there with all the rhythmic complexity. That would completely put him over the top.
Peripheral Factors ::
It’s a huge pet peeve of mine, but I have to ask: Why so late? Why did nothing start until almost 11PM? There might have been a lot more satisfied people if the evening’s festivities would’ve wrapped up at about 1 or 1:30 than as it did at 3AM.
No complaints about the sound system. It may or may not have been too loud, but I’m one of the few smart ones who wears earplugs everywhere, so for me that wasn’t a factor.
It’s become customary to include some sort of projection show or computer-based animation display of some sort at electronic music shows, but I certainly could’ve done without this one. Even with the mildly interesting, other-worldly fractal images, I suppose it may have helped if there was an actual screen for projecting as opposed to the back wall which itself already had a mural painted on it. And when the visuals crew complained towards the end of the evening that the majority of the lights came on thus obscuring their projections, it’d be interested to find out if anyone even noticed.
Overall venue: Not bad at all. $12 was just right, especially with the free parking. And more places definitely need big, comfy chairs and couches like this place had.
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Links ::
