Guided evolution at 130 beats per minute

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,

Faith, unknown pleasures, and one imaginary girl

(This is one of my favorite of my old Epinions.com music writings. It's a concert review from late 2003, so it's not remotely practical, but Facebook's been abuzz with here's-some-cool-concerts-I've-seen nostalgia, and re-reading this, I figured this can be my entry.)
 
In logical terms, I suppose there’s two reasons why you should want to hear about the Mary Timony concert I saw Wednesday night.  First of all, you might be a fan of the type of music she and bassist Jeff Goddard were playing.  Do you like the starkness of the Faith/ Pornography-era Cure and their drum machines, the weird but disciplined guitar howl of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, the fierce if muddy monolith that was Black Sabbath?  Then never mind, this was written 13 years ago, ha ha ha ha. Or, secondly, do you simply like Mary Timony: for Helium’s dissonant multi-guitar blur, or for the mediaevalized indie-rock of her solo career?  Then obviously you’d be curious to see how her songs transfer to other settings.

Neither of these, however, has much to do with why I found her concert so revelatory, or why I’m telling you about it.

One chatty dwarf and 2200 avid faces

Notes on last night’s Ben Folds solo-with-piano concert at Carolina Theater of Greensboro:

1. I had no idea he’s 50 years old. Dude looks real good for 50. Similarly, it’s snuck up on me how truly impressive I find his catalog. My blog’s countdown of my favorite songs has a one-per-artist limit that’s often easy to enforce, but he’s got fully ten songs that would qualify for me to write about — some funny and aggressive, some incredibly sweet, some thoughtful and a bit neurotic, one that helped anticipate and explain Trump’s presidency by six years. Even only playing five of those, he had no problem filling a 100-minute-plus-encore concert with excellent songs.

Real crowd pleasers: the best music of 2016, part last

(continued from part three)

Best live show(s) you saw in 2016
I'm tempted to say Le Vent du Nord at the National Folk Festival in Greensboro in October. Sociopolitical Quebecois folk songs, in French, are not an easy thing to make a North Carolinian general audience enjoy, understand, and sing along (in a foreign tongue) with, and Le Vent have some impressive tricks to make it happen. Also, it was an outdoor show and the weather was beautiful.

But I'm gonna pick Shearwater, the Cat's Cradle, December 14. Their singer's public presentation is like mine -- a somewhat sheepish but agreeable storytelling voice, explaining cryptic lyrics, telling little jokes that sometimes go somewhere, and willing to make carefully-worded exploratory leaps. For example, I didn't know "Backchannels" was about "This little voice I sometimes get in the back of my head -- hopefully it's just me -- that says 'Hey, Jonathan, you've had a really nice run, and maybe now you should kill yourself". But it takes a lot of grace to tell that in a friendly, non-worrisome way and make it about "the last taboo, something we're not allowed to talk about in polite society, and maybe we should be. I suspect it's gotten pretty common since November, like I could bring it up and strangers would say 'Yeah! Me too!'. Like we should  bring it into the open and reveal for the tiny, impotent thing it really is".

No, I never feel that way. But what a useful speech, and what a tremendously fond, chatty concert it all was. The covers of David Bowie's Lodger era -- and of "the national anthem", by which Meiburg meant "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" -- were odd and utterly inspired as well.

Most overrated artist/album