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Thursday, June 9th Decibel and Wake Up proudly present: - MEAT BEAT MANIFESTO - Wax Trax, TVT, Mute, Electra, Nothing, Quartermass - DUB TRIO - www.dubtrio.com $15 8 pm doors 21+ 925 East Pike St. Seattle

quoted 1 line CHECK OUT THIS WEEK'S FEATURE ARTICLE IN THE STRANGER

>>>CHECK OUT THIS WEEK'S FEATURE ARTICLE IN THE STRANGER

Jack of All Trades Synthesizing Meat Beat Manifesto by Dave Segal You can boil down Jack Dangers's musical stance to the title of an old Kinks song: "I'm Not Like Everybody Else." For 17 years, his band Meat Beat Manifesto have been adding galvanizing facets to electronic music's arsenal, and inspiring hordes of producers along the way. The only constant in Meat Beat Manifesto's long career has been an insatiable quest for fresh rhythms and mind-altering textures. Meat Beat Manifesto began in Swindon, England, while Dangers's previous band, Perennial Divide, were winding down. MBM's aptly titled Armed Audio Warfare debut LP was slated to come out in 1988, but the masters were damaged in a fire. MBM rewrote and re-recorded some of these tracks for Storm the Studio, and later an altered version of AAW saw official release on Wax Trax! Both records established MBM as progenitors of a brutal form of electronic music that blends extreme elements of industrial, hiphop, sampladelia, and noise. Dangers brought a supercharged, chaotic musique-concrete aesthetic to electronica, a style marked by information overload and emergency-room adrenaline, which in turn influenced genres like drum 'n' bass and Big Beat. Remarkably, Storm and Warfare attracted a large underground fan base. Similarly remarkable is that Dangers's well of enthusiasm and creativity for music hasn't run dry nearly 20 years into his career. "I've come up with this process," Dangers says, "which has taken me that long to get into shape, where I can actually do music the way I want to do it-quickly and with 100-percent inspiration. It's basically experience. The more you practice at something, the better you get. Along the way, you can lose inspiration, but it hasn't really happened to me. I love music more now than I did 20 years ago. Based in San Francisco for a decade, Dangers flaunts his restless creative energy on MBM's latest release, At the Center. The disc is part of Thirsty Ear's Blue Series, which links electronic musicians with jazz instrumentalists. On At the Center, Thirsty Ear prez Peter Gordon chips in with flute, with Bad Plus drummer Dave King and inventive keyboardist Craig Taborn also contributing. As Dangers notes, MBM's jazz influences surface as early as 1990's "Hello Teenage America"; further, Herbie Hancock collaborators Bennie Maupin and Pat Gleeson contributed to 1998's Actual Sounds + Voices. At the Center allows Dangers to flex his flute, clarinet, and compositional chops within an avant-garde jazz context, and he rises to his elite pickup band's lofty level. "I've always liked the improvisational aspect of jazz and the fact that it doesn't come with lyrics and vocals that tend to date tracks," Dangers says. "Like dub, it's open-ended." At the Center is yet one more rewarding deviation in a career abounding with surprising tangents. "I like doing things in music which aren't of the norm," Dangers understates. "When people started sounding like the stuff I had done, the last thing I'm gonna do is go along with that. And that's infuriating to record labels. It's my in-built self-destruct mechanism that kicks in [laughs]. That's why [my music] has never been commercially viable. I've got too many styles. For some people, it's just too confusing. Even in electronic music, a lot of people [are one-dimensional]. I just can't do that. I've gotta find other avenues of making it sound different." And look different, too. "In a live environment, we're doing a lot of video manipulation with audio/visual sampling along the lines of Emergency Broadcast Network," Dangers says. "That's still a new area that hasn't been well-traveled. There are a couple of new devices, like the DVJ, where you can manipulate DVDs in real time. It's the same principle [as Pioneer's CDJ], but you're scratching visuals." An inveterate analog-synth aficionado, Dangers owns a rare EMS Synthi 100, which he's played along with a showing of legendary sci-fi flick Forbidden Planet. (Important released this on CD-credited to Jack Dangers-revealing another side to his talents.) "It's got 7,200 inputs on it. You can get sounds out of it like nothing else in the world." Even at this late date, Dangers' motives remain altruistic. "The reason I got into music was because bands inspired me-mainly Cabaret Voltaire and Kraftwerk. If I can do that for someone, then I've achieved what I wanted to do. My problem is, what do I do next?" Hard to predict, but whatever Dangers works on, it'll be distinctive-and emulated by other musicians. [DECIBEL LOVES YOU] www.dbfestival.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org