- With an excellent headliner booking, Shift and Decibel brought the UK's grimy newcomer Joker to Seattle, with opening sets by two locals to set the tone.
Of the two locals, Introcut started the night with some low-key tunes, a few turntable tricks and some scratching mixed in to kick off the evening with a good if non-memorable set. Sublo came on next, and seemed to be in the middle of some type of an identity crisis, though he eventually retreated into the lowest common denominator of the dubstep movement, the newly-coined sub-genre "brostep" (think Rusko's "Woo Boost"). Musically empty sequences of sawtooth and sinewave patterns grind on my nerves, but they tend to be crowd-pleasers for bassheads and crossover fans. At the end of Sublo's set, he was really ranging around, playing gabbery remixes ("Rhythm is a Dancer", anyone?) alongside what sounded like pitch-dropped drum & bass. By the time 12:30 AM had rolled around, the crowd inevitably thinned—weekday night, you know.
Joker started at 12:40, immediately starting into something deeper. I understood immediately why Joker had brought an MC, the Bristol-based producer had almost no stage presence. Dressed in black and dark gray, black NY ball cap pulled low, back behind his computer and the 1200's, he was a shadow. Even later, when he took his black jacket off, his gray button-down was a stark contrast to the intricate and explosive music he was playing. MC Nomad, on the other hand, was inviting and visible, and his voice brought all the elements of the music together.
It took about 15 minutes for the two of them to chill the crowd out, tame the levels, settle the energy and pull everyone together. After that, the show was what I expected and what I had hoped for—deep, intelligent, grimy, rhythmically complex, not so much prone to repetition as to variation. Waves of bass, reedy and occasionally jazz-centric synth lines, all wandering around in a big audio soup. Joker was using a vinyl control system through a Mac, I'm not sure which program, and he's a good DJ, which always helps. Sometimes his chops on the mixer were a little lazy, but you can tell he understands beat-matching and flow; those pieces of live performance that producers can miss the mark on occasionally.
Halfway through his set, I was happily in the middle of the crowd up front, battling against a bunch of sweaty dudes who kept hugging each other talking about how they needed to leave now and some poor girl who had no idea what was going on who was randomly headbutting people in their backs, falling over, and then repeating the process. Nice!
By 1:15 and there was a nice controlled frenzy going on, but Seattle's early club-closing rules were about to surface. Relaxed into the best part of his set so far, you could see the surprise on Joker's face when the bar staff tapped his shoulder at 1:30 and said "ten minutes." Wha? Newcomers to the city are always surprised. I never understand why they aren't warned. Nomad hopped on the mic and asked if we wanted dubstep or drum & bass, and the D&B got a bigger shout, so Joker put on a smashing train of bass and snare snaps for his final cut of the evening.
I have to admit that I felt a little cheated that we only got about 50 minutes of what should have been an hour and a half show. I rest easy though, knowing Joker is going to blow up the rest of the way before too long, but I was there to see him before his space got too crowded. When he's headlining major shows around the world, I can say to myself in my head, "I remember that one night when..."