Notes on seeing Simian Mobile Disco in concert at Moogfest in Durham:
1. Moogfest 2017 is the first multi-day music festival I've ever attended. Electronica is not my field, but I owed K for dragging her to see Jesca Hoop and (although she'd volunteered) Ben Folds, singer-songwriters without even the grace to have English accents. In the specific case of Simian Mobile Disco, the act she was most eager to see, I even know that I liked their 2007 album Attack Sustain Decay Release. The album has songs, with guest singers, although Simian Mobile Disco themselves are two geeky white guys standing in front of banks of switches and knobs and faders.
2. Their performance, on the other hand, was 80 minutes of voice-less improvisation. "Electronica" is as large, encompassing, and (at core) distinct a genre as "Classical", "Jazz", "Pop/ Rock", or "Hip-Hop", and the first 15 minutes or so, I spent at an intellectualized remove -- dancing all the time, sure (and happily watching K and a large portion of the crowd do the same), but while trying to decide how to process the experience. In Simian Mobile Disco's favor,
James Ford and Jas Shaw have a restless preference, shared by me, for having new ideas continually evolve out of old ones; at any given moment, the concert sounded *different* than it had 20 seconds prior (and somehow or other Ford and Shaw seemed able to verbally communicate, although I didn't see headphones and the place was freakin' loud). Still, it took time to get past the insistent voice in my head saying "It's two dudes making totally artificial machine noises in 4/4 at a tempo that I'm not sure has varied even once".
2a. Sneak preview: the tempo definitely varied at least once, slowing down right before the end. Perhaps it wasn't the only time.
3. For the next, say, 45 minutes, I think I achieved the altered consciousness appropriate to electronica. I'm not at all meditative by nature (nor do I get drunk or use illegal drugs), so I still had thoughts. But I can't tell you what they were, for I felt not a shred of need to organize or recall them. It felt different. Also, happy. "Be here now", urged John Lennon, and Oasis took it mean "get zonked out of your skull and bloat your songs to 8 minutes for no reason because editing and judgment take you out of the moment". But that doesn't mean the original advice sucks.
4. That said, my favorite 20 minutes or so of the concert were at the end, when I slipped into the mode that makes these reviews possible: "be attentive enough now to remember this for later". I have just enough formal music education to describe instruments semi-competently, but what the hell do Simian Mobile Disco sound like? At various times near the end of the concert, answers included
* A drum machine dreaming of being a xylophone, which in turn dreamed of conversing undersea with the whales.
* Morning fog waking itself up by doing calisthenics. Soon robotic tanks trundled through the fog, over bridges that attempted vigorously, like broncos, to buck them off.
* An iPhone playing a new schedule-reminder tone for a stadium of people who all had the same doctor appointment.
* A version of Music for Airports in which the circling airplanes themselves are Brian Eno, calming passengers with the gleaming purity of their engines.
* An angel, alone in a vast echoing cavern, attempting to re-create the principles of language from the first lines of the choruses of Trio's "Da Da Da" and the Police's "De Do Do Do De Da Da Da".
* A United Nations building of the world's insects, with all of the translators among all of their languages piped directly at the metal walls two feet from our heads in simulcast.
* And an idealistic but obsessive-compulsive teapot that's trying to make outdoor friends by boiling over in birdsong, but can't resist correcting the birds by quantizing the notes as rigidly as possible.
5. Final note: behind the band was a constantly-shifting visual display of abstract art, a style-meld of Vassily Kandinsky and computer-chip schematics. These are two modes of art I find appealing, but I don't seem to find much virtue in replacing each such picture every 1/5 of a second. That said, very near the end, they were replaced for a minute with a gliding, glowing multicolored display of what appeared to be beer can rings -- if beer can rings were the next popular form of jewelry. It was my favorite visual minute, so: perhaps they should be.
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