- LA was treated to an all-star lineup on April 30th when Kieran Hebden, AKA Four Tet, wrangled Floating Points, Daphni, Ben UFO and Madlib onto a single bill. The session went down at the historic Shrine Auditorium, a 6,300-capacity space that sits next to the University Of Southern California's campus. Hebden's concept—no set times, no headliner—gave the night a laid-back, congenial feel. The cast of DJs cavorting onstage looked more like friends at a living room listening party than performers playing to thousands.
The Shrine's labyrinthine hallways and hangar-like main room seemed to hold an unusual cross section of LA concertgoers, as the city's underground dance music community mixed with Coachella-tanned college kids and the older KCRW electronica set. Some even sported distinctly EDM fashions, hinting at a slow crossover from LA's mainstream into more specialized events.
With Ben UFO on warm-up duties and Daphni closing the show, the night moved freely between genres and tempos, creating little sense of trajectory. Floating Points, who played LA with his band just days before, gave a standout performance, drawing from his reliable bag of modern soul and disco obscurities, such as Bileo's "You Can Win" and Cindy Rodriguez's euphoric singalong "What You Need is My Love." Records like those do a lot of the legwork for you, but even so the London DJ brought finesse beyond track selection, riding the filters and working 40-year-old songs like contemporary DJ tools.
To my surprise, it was Madlib who sparked the most vigorous dancing of the night when he opened his set with A Tribe Called Quest's "Steve Biko (Stir It Up)." The rest of the set played out in his signature rapid-fire cut and paste style, dropping bits of saccharine soul alongside his own productions, miming the drums as rap luminaries House Shoes and Egon nodded along behind him. Later, Madlib shifted the vibe with Dego & Kaidi's "Black Is Key," bridging the gap between London and LA and priming the room for Four Tet.
Launching straight into Gong's ethereal prog-rock, Four Tet moved the night in a more electronic direction. He played several of his own productions as well as sonically similar material, while taking occasional left turns into Prince and '70s funk. But for most of the audience, it was Four Tet's ventures into big-room dance music that held the biggest reward: when his set ended with his own remix of Eric Prydz's "Opus,"—a buildup of soaring arpeggios that explodes into a passage of pummelling techno—the crowd lost it. Perhaps this was proof that outside of a small community pushing house and techno in the underground, the rest of LA's ears are still very much tuned to hip-hop and EDM.
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Daily Laurel