Saturday night Cylob, Rich Devine, and Flashbulb played at Gabe's Iowa City. They're playing as I write in Minneapolis and will be in Seattle in a few nights. My advice if you're able is to go and prepare for a proper brain melting!
Cylob's DJ set was anything but the usual thing. He was using Traktor, using a game controller to cue and drop tracks. What stood out for me was the way he managed to mix in what amounts to a nearly complete survey of dance music from the past 25 years. Hip Hop, Electro, old school Hardcore, Nu School Breaks, Booty House, Acid, 80s post-disco and his patented Cylobean weirdness. Throughout the set he would build up 10 minutes of crowd-pleasing bumpers, and then detour into Rephlexian mental-ness, and then bring thing back to rave-yer-face-off funk before he lost the dancefloor. The effect on the crowd -- many local musicians, a few IDM-list chin-strokers, but mostly party kids -- was to stretch what constituted party music. Towards the end of his set there were boogy-down, hands in the air moments that happened during beatless, experimental interludes. While the music regrettably known as IDM has a reputation for being obtuse and inaccessible to the hoi polloi, Cylob showed that it can be funky, sweaty fun as well. Flashbulb's set was a bit more music-for-music's sake. I saw him in Detroit last May at the Detroit Underground party during Fuse-In, and this set had some of the same Drill & Bass craziness. But Ben also played some very lush melodic music that I'd love to have on record. He can really shred on the guitar, too, and while virtuosity by itself is sterile, when he does it, it is organically of a piece with the music he makes. I've seen Rich Devine play a few times, and something has happened in the past couple of years that you wouldn't expect from listening to his records: he's become a showman. While the core of his set was his tracks played in Traktor, he's put together a midi-controlled assemblage of effects that allow him to stop tracks on a dime and warp it completely beyond recognition. Sure, anyone can noodle around with granular effects, but no one besides Rich seems to really play them like an instrument. At the end of his set, he broke out the 303 and 606 for some insane live acid which I could have enjoyed another hour of. This is a show I would have loved to see anywhere, but in my hometown of Iowa City it was a special treat, and not just because the venue is 5 minutes from my house. Iowa ravers have a long and loving relationship with midwest hardcore, which goes back to an affiliation with Drop Bass Network in the mid-90s. I don't know what it's like other places, but when the beats get hard, and the BPMs push past 200, in Iowa, that's when people here go crazy. No matter what these guys played, people kept dancing. So forget Intelligent Dance Music. Three guy, who are arguably in the vanguard of that sort of music, came and rocked the joint proper. We all had a few too many beers, pogoed like cretins on crack, pumped our fists in the air, and had more stupid fun than should be legal. After the show when we were loading out, it started snowing heavy wet snow of a sort Chris/Cylob had never seen before, so my night ended with him standing on the back stairs catching giant snowflakes in his hands and grinning like a little kid. Leave it to Iowa weather to provide the final extravagant special effect! I made a board recording of the whole night, and if the boys give me the go ahead I'll put it up for download.
