Some incredible shit went down Friday at Decibel. Some of it sounded like this.

BIOSPHERE @ BROADWAY PERFORMANCE HALL
Honestly, Biosphere (Norway’s Geir Jenssen) put on a more varied, dynamic show at last year’s Substrata. His set last night wasn’t bad by any means, but the first track’s rhythm remained unvarying for about 15 minutes. Don't get me wrong, it was a fine rhythm (tom/2 kicks & 4 cymbal taps), but some changes wouldn’t have gone amiss. Like a masterly soundtrack composer, Biosphere increased the tension of his teeming, momentous drones in subtle increments. There was something almost classically Hollywood about the suspenseful atmospheres and melancholy grandeur of much of Biosphere’s performance. Toward the end, things became more limpidly ambient until a chilling synth part came in, sounding like Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking strings from Psycho flattened into a monotone EEEEEEEE. Aaaand scene…

ELEH @ BROADWAY PERFORMANCE HALL
Eleh is cloaked in mystery. His identity is known only to a select circle of initiates. His music is so minimal, it makes Pan_sonic sound like ELP. Last night, he sat on the floor in the dark, his back to the audience, as he caressed a keyboard and tinkered with a Serge modular synthesizer that looked like it was shipped straight from Morton Subotnick’s studio ca. 1968. (Thank Allah Eleh wasn’t playing yet another fucking silver Mac.) Eleh began with keening, wispy tones that curled over a perpetual, faint universal 60-hz hum. Eventually, booming bass belches, methodically spaced, issued like a belligerent household appliance rebelling against its duties. This was followed by a fluctuating bass tone that felt like a blanket sweeping over you and tucking you in for your eternal dirt nap. Par-TAY. The epitome of an anti-personality, Eleh got up and walked offstage without acknowledging the crowd, as his sound continued to was and wane. Soon after, the lights went on. The end.

• Heather Schofner
• Emptyset

EMPTYSET @ MELROSE MARKET STUDIOS
If you thought nothing could top Thursday’s Modern Love Records showcase (mea culpa), Emptyset kind of proved you wrong at the Raster-Noton showcase. (Raster-Noton has been one of the best labels on the planet since 1999.) The British duo played techno that belonged in an S&M grindhouse, its vicious tones and vengeful beats meting out punishment for the sheer glee of it. Machismo played a role in this music, but it didn’t come off as obnoxious, even at its most militaristic (beats going off like artillery). Emptyset’s heavy, maximal tekno bore some of the most obese kickdrums ever to give speakers embolisms. At times, their brutalist, abstractions recalled Fred Bigot’s bass-intensive slugfests. At others, the tempo picked up to a swift yet still massively heavy cruising speed, augmented by crazy, serrated, mechanized textures. Often you felt like you were in the presence of an megalomaniacal automaton. Frequently you felt like you were in an abattoir—or a war. “That was original,” someone said afterward. Um, yeah.

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• T. Moorman

The bass in mix for Erykah Badu and the Cannabinoids at the Paramount Theater was overpowering, and there were 17 laptops onstage. Actually I counted seven, with one of the Cannabinoids regularly pressing the “wind chime” button. On the floor, toward the rear of the Fabergé confines of the Paramount, the sound was a swampy mess. Reports from the balcony were that the bass overpowered up there as well. Her vocals were completely indiscernible, washed in realms of reverb and delay, but she still owned it powerfully. In the live context of her show with the Cannabinoids, Badu’s voice slots in more as an instrument, so understanding every word isn’t what I think she’s going for anyway. Highpoint was a Flying Lotus number off Until the Quiet Comes out October 2 in the US. Occasionally she palmed at a drum pad (hello bass) to her left, (with a brain to her right) sometimes topping off the plain of the song with a hand-tied 808 flurry. Projections sailed through seas of animated ganglia and Tron-world dolly shots of the pyramids. Songs mostly stayed on their own mid to down tempo flight paths with few key changes, and when they touched down, for my ears, the bass just overtook too much. It was one of those shows that seemed to drain, not charge. I love Erykah Badu, though; she can do no wrong. Maybe I should have been stoned. (Brain picture after jump.)

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• K.C. Fennessy
• Glowing Decibel logo between sets

It's to the advantage of artists and audiences alike that Decibel discourages flash photography and limits picture-taking to the first three songs of each set (there might be exceptions, but those were the basic rules laid out in the press logistics mailing). It's also why the photos below aren't all that great, but at least you get the gist of Brooklyn's Julianna Barwick and London's Maria Minerva, who both performed solo at the Triple Door as part of the Optical 2: Ascension showcase (I wasn't able to catch Lulacruza and Anenon, who rounded out the bill).

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Last night, my little slice of Decibel was so intense and amazing. It went something like this…

MARIA MINERVA @ TRIPLE DOOR
Maria Minerva looked like she was dressed to perform some modern dance, but instead she (wo)manned her gear with one hand and gripped the mic in the other. With these rudimentary tools, she enchanted a sedate crowd at Triple Door, a venue that always seems too posh for the music I go there to hear. Minerva slung her voice like a lasso, flamboyantly swooping up and down her register while coaxing distorted keyboard ululations. Her set largely explored a languid sort of dub and electronic pop hybrid, but sometimes diverged into deep drone zones, sculpted airplane-engine roar, lopsided house music, midtempo funk, and, during the last track, a Moog-like babble that evoked Mort Garson, Dick Hyman, and Gershon Kingsley. Lots of people were leaving throughout the performance (probably to see Orbital, who, according to reports I heard, were weak). Bad choice, people.

• Jack Newton
• Maria Minerva

DJAO @ BARBOZA
I will keep saying this until it happens (or it doesn’t): Local producer DJAO (aka Alex Osuch) is going to blow up, any year now. He led off the Dropping Gems showcase with a masterly set of slow-your-roll hiphop/future bass spectrality that had the crowd transfixed. DJAO contrasted ocean-floor bass pressure with ethereal tone impressionism and angelic croons (his own) to stunningly beautiful and yearning effect. And as the sole practitioner of Chiltonwave™, he scropped and chewed Big Star’s “Thirteen” until it gradually deliquesced into a pool of molasses-y loveliness. DUG DJ Jon François said, “I like [DJAO’s music] because I feel like I’m alone when I’m listening to it, even in a club.” Achieving that sort of intimacy is a special skill.

• Heather Schofner
• DJAO

CUT HANDS @ MELROSE MARKET STUDIOS
I hate to be that guy, but if you missed the Modern Love Records showcase at MMS, you fucked up, badly. Cut Hands (William Bennett of Whitehouse, looking like your favorite humanities professor) unleashed a sadistic rhythm orgy, a relentless barrage of percussion and flayed frequencies, for a little over an hour. It was one of the most intense sets I’ve seen at Decibel, and I’ve been going since year 1. Cut Hands’ most recent album is titled Afro Noise, and that’s what the man delivered. An iconoclastic Caucasian Brit messing around with Ghanaian and Congolese rhythms risks accusations of cultural colonialism, but fuck, this shit sounds phenomenal, so loosen up, Mr. Politically Correct. Bennett, now in his 50s, danced feverishly to his own clattering madness, an elephant stampede of kick/kettle drums—or maybe frame drums the size of a satellite dish? Whatever they were, they left you dazed and contused. Frequent metallic tonalities clanged like gangbusters and drums progressively became more weapon-like as the night wore on. You couldn't help feeling thoroughly pummeled. So damn primal...

• Heather Schofner
• Cut Hands

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• Snapshot of the Visuals Projected

Ann Arbor based Dabrye phased in and out of his citywise cuts slyly last night at Barboza. After some technical difficulties and delay, he began his set with the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme. All was a head nod/body job from that point on. Dabrye’s a devotee of downtowned, crate dug beats. He lowballed, highballed, J Dilla-balled and ball-balled, with nothing too full bore, and nothing overstated. His trafficked pulses are natural, with stems from funk, jive, and R&B. Highpoints for me were the instrumental in-betweens. The oddball crossovers, where beats converged in transition. The main line would fade out, and the weirder, bizarre-er rhythm would be left alone, paired with a looping or sampled sound. The beat seemed bigger then, more hopping, more impossible to ignore.

Even on relatively light opening nights, Decibel is overwhelming. For example…

DEMDIKE STARE RE-SCORING JEAN ROLLIN’S LA VAMPIRE NUE @ BROADWAY PERFORMANCE HALL
Demdike Stare’s re-purposed score for this kitsch softcore-erotica/faux-existential-horror flick outclassed the movie by several orders of magnitude; I’m still trying to figure out by exactly how much. The British duo sat to the left of the screen and unspooled tenebrous drones and cobra-charming beats and eerie airs in conjunction with Rollin’s garish images. Where the director seemingly wanted us to cower in fright, we guffawed. La Vampire Nue was reconfigured into an hour for this performance, but we got the gist fairly quickly. Demdike Stare lent the farcical film an ominous gravitas it didn’t really earn—but I’m grateful that they did.

• Heather Schofner
• Kid Smpl

KID SMPL @ BARBOZA
Kid Smpl (young Seattle producer Joey Butler) is an earnest disciple at the Church of Bass. His sumptuous, see-through melodies are like an anvil made out of feathers: They exude a diaphanous heaviness that projects deep reserves of emotion in every waft. I glibly created a reductive equation to describe Kid Smpl’s music, but I think it’s valid: Burial x Cocteau Twins + Robitussin + blissful mourning. His version of “night bus” is a new kind of holy minimalism, a sacred form of bass music. It’s almost too beautiful to live.

• Heather Schofner
• Cyanwave

CYANWAVE @ NEUMOS
The Seattle duo of Justin Byrnes and Keith Kelley were the best I’ve ever seen them, pushing out fathoms-deep dub techno that harked back to the Chain Reaction label’s glory days (Porter Ricks, Fluxion, Monolake, etc.). Cyanwave were giving Neumos’ specially outfitted subs a serious workout, with the kickdrums sounding like submarines thudding against each other. Heady stuff.

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