Saw Panasonic last night in NYC.
First act was DJ spooky and some guitarist making a SHITLOAD OF FUCKING
NOISE to a room half full of people on the floor. Afterwards I peeked at
Spooky's stack of records on the stage - on the top of the stack - his own
fucking record!
Then came Blond Redhead, a cute alternative rock trio which inexplicably
played between two electronic noise acts... Ho hum...
Panasonic was great. They look so cool on stage too, so commanding, just
messing with their little decks, facing right out at us. Its cool to see
two guys on a stage making so much noise without having to bang on guitars
and stuff. They seemed to be improvising most of their material, twiddling
with knobs until they had a groove then going with it for a bit, then
moving on to some other noise and bleeps. They opened with the off-tempo
beat that was kickin, went into some noise, back to a groove, etc. The last
ten minutes of the show seemed to be a kind of a beatless noise rut from
which, unfortunately, they could not extricate themselves.
They seemed to operate on this tension-release system, where the white
noise and arrhythmic bleeps would seem to slowly evolve into beats, but not
quite... teasing you into thinking you would be rewarded with a groove...
then, if you were good, you would get your groove and all would be sweet as
long as they let you have your groove, then the beat would dissolve back
into the analog bleepy wash, only to come out again later...
I was dancing, but most of the crowd was just watching them, many of them
with their fingers in their ears. Those of you who are worried about the
mainstreaming of electronic acts don't have to worry - as long as the IDM
crowds stay so boring, tight assed and stiff, we can be suire the music
will stay esoteric and the artists will stay poor.
I asked the Panasonic guys afterwards if they usually get people dancing
more, and they said no. They seemed to be embarassed by the question, as if
they thought that dancing was bad. Although Panasonic is sometimes lumped
into the techno category, and although their grooves are clearly house
music influenced, they and their fans still appear to suffer from the same
snotty problem that this entire IDM mailing list is founded on: That there
is "intelligent" dance music and there is "unintelligent" dance music. And
too often this breaks down to meaning that intelligent dance music is too
good to actually dance to, unlike dumb dance music like house.
By the way, one thing I'm noticing more and more at IDM type shows is the
total lack of diversity in the crowd. At this show, the first thing I
noticed was that besides the doorman and DJ spooky, there appeared to be no
black people in the house. When I'm in an environment like that I have to
ask myself why it is that way... The promoters of these events market them
like they were alternative rock head nodding events, and to be honest Blond
Redhead had a bigger crowd than Panasonic. It would be cool for Panasonic
to play with an act that really actually is about dancing like maybe Daft
Punk. Nah, maybe not - just like most Panasonic fans don't know they are
listening to techno, most Daft Punk fans probably don't even know that they
are listening to old school purebred house music. I'll bet Daft Punk shows
are just as boring.
IDM should be more fun! I had fun, and all I had was a flask of rum in my
pocket. What's the solution? Strobe lights?
-CF