Halloween 2009. Portland, Oregon, at the 2410. It's past midnight under a clear, cool sky. There's a huge glowing head behind the mist, the lights, and a fully loaded and matched JBL sound rig built up like a castle around Voodeux, the duo of Tanner Ross and James Watts.
The crowd is in full dress, angels and demons, bumblebees, gangsters, zombies and farm animals. It's not crowded; there's room to move along the sides and even up front. It's a 21-and over show, so there are no children flopped all over the floor. Everybody's dancing. The guy dressed up as a cotton ball, or maybe a cloud, is shedding his costume everywhere; people are picking up his pieces and throwing them at each other.
I've not seen Tanner and James play together. I caught the Kilowatts (James Watts) performance in the park at the Decibel Festival a month ago; it was deep, downtempo, with super clean beats and breaks, driving but simple basslines, textured percussion and melodies, very heady stuff. I've listened to Voodeux's The Paranormal, an album with a cheeky creepy vibe, and an internal dark, distorted and dissonant message.
I did not know what to expect from a live performance.
What I got, and what Portland got, was a hybrid dark techno meets dance meets let's-see-how-hard-we-can-push-the-speakers meets let's take it all away, piece by piece, and then give it back to them like a gunshot music. Got that?
During lots of typical techno sets, there are lulls where the performers aren't really taking risks, so the musical rewards are pretty tame. This was not one of those shows. Rumor has it that during their live performances, James does the primary arranging on the fly on his Open Labs DBeat, and Tanner works the levels and the effects processing through his MIDI controllers and the mixer. The tension between the two of them comes in peaks and valleys, the flow of the music is both cooperative and unscripted, but you know when they're both headed up the same mountain to get to that spot where all the elements come together. Those were the times in the night when the kids in the crowd had wide eyes and were looking at each other saying "holy hell."
At one point there was a musical phrase with a repeating eight-count sine bass tone that made the room feel like an earthquake. Damn. There were a few other tracks during the peaks of the night with crazy layers of full percussion lines, deep kicks and drums dancing around each other—think hearing a house track and a breakbeat at the same time, perfectly synched and with pads and drifting sound effects over top. Whoa.
The music, at times, got a little more experimental and dropped into the realm of mind-provoking bleepy-creepies, but that usually just meant the sledgehammer was imminent. It didn't hurt that the sound was constantly maintained during the performance and the visuals were appropriate for this thoughtful and intelligent late October booking. In fact, you can't ask for much more; you can only look forward to the next time the planets align. Halloween on wax, indeed...
Published /
Thu, 05 Nov 2009
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