Nov 4th - Kid Koala downstairs @ The Middle East
I was walking over to the Middle East with Liza, scanning the line that formed outside the downstairs door. Kids were queueing up to get in to the Kid Koala show, and Liza's flip assessment was "where are all the girls?" It was goatees and glasses as far as the eye could see, but I caught a familiar cluster of dreadlocks in the crowd, though they were much shorter the last time I saw them, back before their owner, The Rough Guidesman, moved to Berlin.
The Rough Guidesman used to have an apartment by Fenway when I lived in Kenmore, and we had this habit of dropping in on each other and going off on long, meandering walks through the city. His feet were always more restless than mine, and that eventually led him to backpack across India, Nepal and Thailand. He lives in Berlin now, but last I heard he might be moving to Barcelona, though I guess for the time being he's in Boston. I yelled his name, he looked up and we exchanged what's up's and how are you's. He introduced his European girlfriend then asked me what I was queueing for .
"Kid Koala. Short Attention Span Theatre."
"what's that?"
"Turntablism. Short films. Good show. You should come."
"and," Liza chimed in, "Cris has tickets."
"Yeah. I've got tickets that I need to sell, too."
"How much?"
"$15. each."
"My girlfriend's got jet lag."
and that's probably as polite and pretentious a kiss-off as one could get these days.
We went in and grabbed space off to the side, reflexively scanning the crowd for familiar faces. Liza said, "I wonder what it's like for a hiphop artist to come out to a show and see an audience full of white people." We joked that it would be like a reverse 8 Mile, and riffed on the idea of juxtaposed musical stereotypes and the prospect of Korean blues singers when DJ Jester came on stage and opened up with the instrumental track from ... the Ghostbusters theme song?
As we looked on with three parts incredulity and one part retro bemusement, Jester scratched his way from Ghostbusters to Tone Loc to Peter Gabriel. I leaned over to Liza and said that it was like listening to the guy who everyone wanted to DJ their high school reunion. She re-calibrated my sense of time by saying, "no, actually, we're thinking of eighth grade reunion." Then, for emphasis, he threw on Simple Minds and "Don't You Forget About Me."
Songs change when you start DJ'ing. They're no longer just songs but layers of sound, lyrics and beats that can be strung together or taken apart to create a set. Turntablists take it a step further, grabbing one sound and tweaking it with the eq in the same way that a trumpet player can tweak the sound of one breath by pressing a few valves. I thought of it as mining the raw material of music, extracting a single note then refining it the way a gemcutter shapes diamonds. Then DJ Jester swung over to "Take My Breath Away", and I realized that he was just being self-indulgent.
Still, it's difficult to fault the man's performance when he accompanied it with that cute, infectious smile and earnestly sung along to every lyric and every sample. He didn't care if he was offending some hipster's aesthetic sensibility, instead daring them to enjoy the retroness of it all, spinning an 80s set with more cheese than the dairy section of a Whole Foods Market.
That sort of vibe continued into the middle act, Lederhosen Lucil -- a Montreal native turned faux Berlin satirist. One can argue that electroclash parodies are redundant terms, but it was still fun to see a French Canadienne ape a German accent and play satires of Chicks on Speed songs. If anything it seemed to mark the general mood of the show, which was all about ditching the cold, clinical performances of laptop musicians and art-fag techno and substituting a sense of humor. Any doubt that electroclash had found its own Weird Al was erased by her last song which was, of course, a polka.
So, you know that thing I was mentioning before about a turntablist playing one note like a trumpet? Take one bar of Jessica Rabbit from the Roger Rabbit soundtrack, give it to this guy named Kid Koala and he can build an entire torch song from that single moment. I first heard of him from Bridget, who saw him open for Radiohead on the Kid A tour and she wouldn't shut up about how good he was. Folks talk about how DJ's use turntables like another instrument, and one always seems to take that as some sort of metaphor. Oh, sure, but it's only kinda like an instrument, and not , you know, a real instrument or anything because it's still recorded media and there's still cheating involved. Whatever. Part of what blew me away on this show was the fact that we had one DJ scratching bass and another scratching drums, while Kid Koala scratched vocals. It was like a deconstructionist's version of a rock band and it was beyond awesome.
I would've been happy with just listening to the trio play, but they took breaks in between numbers to show some short films that had been created by some of their friends, and walk the audience through a brief slideshow of Kid Koala's comic book Nufonia Must Fall. When he busted out a slideshow bingo game, there were a few hecklers calling for more music but the rest of the crowd boo'ed them down. It was less of a pure concert than it was an evening with a twentysomething DJ who just wanted to play with his fans. The look on his face showed that it was pure goofiness, and watching him smiling as he got back to the tables and scratched his way through a gorgeous reinterpretation of Henry Mancini's "Moon River" was the sort of emotion that I've missed seeing after watching too many electronic acts working their airs of studied detachment.
As we left the show, Liza mused that watching a guitarist playing with the same level of virtuosity would've probably been boring, and perhaps the medium is still so fresh that there's still novelty to it. Part of me agreed with that, but I was also thinking about the way Kid Koala could weave whole songs from single notes and that a whole universe of new music can be crafted from one's album collection. It re-ignited a sense of imagination and creativity, and that's all one can ever ask for from shows such as this.
The Rough Guidesman used to have an apartment by Fenway when I lived in Kenmore, and we had this habit of dropping in on each other and going off on long, meandering walks through the city. His feet were always more restless than mine, and that eventually led him to backpack across India, Nepal and Thailand. He lives in Berlin now, but last I heard he might be moving to Barcelona, though I guess for the time being he's in Boston. I yelled his name, he looked up and we exchanged what's up's and how are you's. He introduced his European girlfriend then asked me what I was queueing for .
"Kid Koala. Short Attention Span Theatre."
"what's that?"
"Turntablism. Short films. Good show. You should come."
"and," Liza chimed in, "Cris has tickets."
"Yeah. I've got tickets that I need to sell, too."
"How much?"
"$15. each."
"My girlfriend's got jet lag."
and that's probably as polite and pretentious a kiss-off as one could get these days.
We went in and grabbed space off to the side, reflexively scanning the crowd for familiar faces. Liza said, "I wonder what it's like for a hiphop artist to come out to a show and see an audience full of white people." We joked that it would be like a reverse 8 Mile, and riffed on the idea of juxtaposed musical stereotypes and the prospect of Korean blues singers when DJ Jester came on stage and opened up with the instrumental track from ... the Ghostbusters theme song?
As we looked on with three parts incredulity and one part retro bemusement, Jester scratched his way from Ghostbusters to Tone Loc to Peter Gabriel. I leaned over to Liza and said that it was like listening to the guy who everyone wanted to DJ their high school reunion. She re-calibrated my sense of time by saying, "no, actually, we're thinking of eighth grade reunion." Then, for emphasis, he threw on Simple Minds and "Don't You Forget About Me."
Songs change when you start DJ'ing. They're no longer just songs but layers of sound, lyrics and beats that can be strung together or taken apart to create a set. Turntablists take it a step further, grabbing one sound and tweaking it with the eq in the same way that a trumpet player can tweak the sound of one breath by pressing a few valves. I thought of it as mining the raw material of music, extracting a single note then refining it the way a gemcutter shapes diamonds. Then DJ Jester swung over to "Take My Breath Away", and I realized that he was just being self-indulgent.
Still, it's difficult to fault the man's performance when he accompanied it with that cute, infectious smile and earnestly sung along to every lyric and every sample. He didn't care if he was offending some hipster's aesthetic sensibility, instead daring them to enjoy the retroness of it all, spinning an 80s set with more cheese than the dairy section of a Whole Foods Market.
That sort of vibe continued into the middle act, Lederhosen Lucil -- a Montreal native turned faux Berlin satirist. One can argue that electroclash parodies are redundant terms, but it was still fun to see a French Canadienne ape a German accent and play satires of Chicks on Speed songs. If anything it seemed to mark the general mood of the show, which was all about ditching the cold, clinical performances of laptop musicians and art-fag techno and substituting a sense of humor. Any doubt that electroclash had found its own Weird Al was erased by her last song which was, of course, a polka.
So, you know that thing I was mentioning before about a turntablist playing one note like a trumpet? Take one bar of Jessica Rabbit from the Roger Rabbit soundtrack, give it to this guy named Kid Koala and he can build an entire torch song from that single moment. I first heard of him from Bridget, who saw him open for Radiohead on the Kid A tour and she wouldn't shut up about how good he was. Folks talk about how DJ's use turntables like another instrument, and one always seems to take that as some sort of metaphor. Oh, sure, but it's only kinda like an instrument, and not , you know, a real instrument or anything because it's still recorded media and there's still cheating involved. Whatever. Part of what blew me away on this show was the fact that we had one DJ scratching bass and another scratching drums, while Kid Koala scratched vocals. It was like a deconstructionist's version of a rock band and it was beyond awesome.
I would've been happy with just listening to the trio play, but they took breaks in between numbers to show some short films that had been created by some of their friends, and walk the audience through a brief slideshow of Kid Koala's comic book Nufonia Must Fall. When he busted out a slideshow bingo game, there were a few hecklers calling for more music but the rest of the crowd boo'ed them down. It was less of a pure concert than it was an evening with a twentysomething DJ who just wanted to play with his fans. The look on his face showed that it was pure goofiness, and watching him smiling as he got back to the tables and scratched his way through a gorgeous reinterpretation of Henry Mancini's "Moon River" was the sort of emotion that I've missed seeing after watching too many electronic acts working their airs of studied detachment.
As we left the show, Liza mused that watching a guitarist playing with the same level of virtuosity would've probably been boring, and perhaps the medium is still so fresh that there's still novelty to it. Part of me agreed with that, but I was also thinking about the way Kid Koala could weave whole songs from single notes and that a whole universe of new music can be crafted from one's album collection. It re-ignited a sense of imagination and creativity, and that's all one can ever ask for from shows such as this.