Blogarhythms

This Saturday, after an outing to a record fair (more on that in Friday’s Records at Random post) organized by my homie 12XU to raise money for the Flywheel Arts Collective, I was lucky enough to catch previous Blogarhythms featurees Saul Williams and opening act Dragons of Zynth live on stage at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Massachussets.

If the camera I brought with me liked dimly lit spaces and quickly moving human forms better I’d share more images from the show (the pic at left will have to do), but I figure it better to save you the confusion of trying to decipher which colorful blur is which artist. Lack of visual documentation aside, Saul and DOZ both killed shit, leaving me feeling like I’d just seen a sight rarely beheld on a stage these days, a bunch of honest-to-God Rock stars, not “just another performer,” or “just another band.” They looked, sounded and felt important, as if the survival of popular music and it’s relevance (both artistic and cultural) rested on artists like these, the decisions they make, and how they’re accepted by an audience. And the way they delivered was a relief, dispelling any notions that music (whether Jazz, Rock, Punk or Hip-Hop) could ever die so long as there are artists like these to keep it alive & moving into the future, and people willing to listen & follow it there.

Dead things just don’t jump, shout, sweat, testify, or “rock” like that!

Shout out to CX Kidtronik (who plays his samplers & drum machines like ’70s rockers played guitars & drums) for being the illest band-in-a-box/hypeman I’ve seen in a minute, and to the young lady (whose name I can’t find anywhere) DOZ had playing bass for bringing the low end and looking beautiful while doing it!

Unbeknown to me, Tacoma-born, San Francisco-schooled, Chicago-then-Los Angeles and now Brooklyn-based electronic musician Eliot Lipp (whose drum-programming and synth-bending is comparable to the work of some of Saul Williams’ beatmaking collaborators) was scheduled to take the stage at another Northampton venue the very next night. Lipp’s new album (his debut for the Mush Records label) The Outside had been friends with my headphones for a solid month, but somehow his Northampton gig, and a string of regional dates, had escaped my attention.

Influenced by Hip-Hop, Techno, Electro, IDM and other forms of electronic music The Outside cuts a wide stylistic swath, melding fluid drum-breaks, jittery cut-n-paste chops, low-bit-rate grime, peak-level bass, “Motorik” drum-machine beats, slick 808’s, 80’s Electro-Funk grooves, Italo-Disco chill, jazzy sophistication, and the sweep, gurgle & glitch of old Warp Records releases. The too-short “Baby Tank” crunches and thunders with dirty claps, a crushing kick, clipped-peak bass and synth zaps that remind me of “Do You Know Squarepusher.” “7 Mile Tunnel” and “Beyond the City” sound like the product of somebody who profoundly wants to take a trip on the “Trans Europe Express” with a certain group of Germans, and maybe their disciples from the early Hip-Hop/Electro scene like Arthur Baker and John Robbie. While “See What It’s About” finds lip turning his array of synths into a virtual orchestra to craft a moody, melodic and funkily soulful uptempo groover that recalls crate classics of the Jazz-Funk era.

Eliot Lipp “See What It’s About”

I don’t know what his live show is like, so I can only assume Lipp doesn’t come off like a Rock star on stage. I feel pretty safe in that assumption. But electronic musicians like him who deconstruct the very concept of bands, performers and the cult of personality, push the limits of how sound is produced and force us even to reevaluate what a musical instrument is are just as integral to the process of keeping music alive & relevant and dragging it, as well as us, into the future.

- El Keter