Plaid’s Music Gets You Twisted Up

Avant-garde musicians are spooky types, as proven by the recent show at the Middle East featuring Plaid, Nobukazu Takemura and Mira Calix. Alien atmospherics were the theme of the night, with the downstairs lounge of the Middle East and clumps of equally weird onlookers basking in light tinged sickly green. Clouds of smoke were penetrated by sheets of cacophonic noise draped over the occasional sullen bass boom, sounding like a malevolent heartbeat. The stage was littered with mostly unidentifiable contraptions; only the distinctive white outline of an iBook served as a reminder that this was conceived by humans.

Mira Calix (the working name of Chantal Passamonte) admirably kept the vaguely disturbing vibe alive as the resident DJ, spinning records from the comfort of the rear stage, barely visible. Signed to the venerable Warp Records, she has often been called the female Aphex Twin. Yet unlike Twin’s growing penchant for self-parody, Calix showed off razor-sharp musical sensibilities and flawless taste in records with a daintily mixed set of beguiling experimental tunes.

The now-trendy “glitch” sound suffers from being too dry and insular to be a truly revolutionary movement, only reaching wider audiences through compelling intermediaries like Björk on Vespertine and Radiohead on Amnesiac. But out of a booming sound system, it sounds utterly compelling, despite being almost impossible to dance to. In the context of the Middle East, the skittering clicks n’ cuts more resembled microbes than beats, a forest of chirruping digital bugs clambering out of vinyl hell and into one’s headspace. Best of all, no two records sounded alike, with fleeting nods to such diverse styles as industrial, hip-hop, jungle and even dancehall.

Japanese enigma Nobukazu Takemura tried to up the ante with his live performance, but following initial problems with the machines (always a bad thing at “electronica” shows), the effect was almost numbing. Takemura’s compositions are largely inscrutable—exuberant and tangled webs of bleeps, squelches and drums occasionally verging on 180 beat-per-minute gabba tempos. This was performance, not participatory, music. The audience could do nothing but stand and let the waves of noise wash over them as Takemura and his labelmate Aki Tsuyoko tweaked the controls.

There was a brilliant, if gimmicky, solution: a synchronized series of looped video animations projected onto a wide screen quickly became the center of attention, and the music its soundtrack. It conveyed something that’s impossible to discern in Takemura’s albums. If Calix’s glitch symphonies were ones and zeros come alive, Takemura’s playful sonic freak-outs were the machines themselves speaking. Blocky polygon men sang along with the disembodied voices; kids frolicked with pixelated woodland creatures during musical lulls. Seemingly senseless static became a conversation between two clay figurines.

Two hours of trying to dance haphazardly to implosive quasi-funk is enough for a day, which is why Plaid garnered the most cheers and excitement. Besides their relative fame, as former members of the Black Dog—a pioneering techno outfit—and as one of the Warp label’s most acclaimed artists, Plaid throw all pretensions out the door. Their music is quirky and experimental, even resembling some of the insectile funk and robo-talk that had preceded them. Yet it’s a perfectly logical extension of the Detroit techno, electro and old-school hip-hop that birthed virtually all of today’s electronic music. Every bone-cracking snare, shuffling high-hat and well-timed bass bomb was there for a reason—to loosen the body and spirit and push grooves to newfound heights.

As is the case with the glut of corporate trance, progressive house and “chill-out” tripe on record stores’ shelves, this strain of experimental electronic music is regarded by middlebrow hipsters as “intelligent” fare. Yet it owes everything to the hedonistic sounds originally crafted by inner-city youth.

Plaid clearly know this, and their entrance was well appreciated, if a bit underwhelming to these eyes. Rather than tuning instruments or hyping the crowd, they stayed true to the geeky stereotype and hooked up their laptops. The performance that followed was surprisingly high-octane, considering their poignant and wonderfully nuanced records. Sheathed in Plaid’s trademark heavenly synths, the funk came like a double shot of adrenaline and a breath of fresh air. The biggest response, other than to Mira dropping a booty ghetto-tech track at the end of her set, was the ominous “Pino Pomo.” From Rest Proof Clockwork, the track’s sinfully simple hip-hop pulse was a revelation in this context.

If only the previous performances hadn’t been so physically and mentally tiring; even at their best and most entertaining, Plaid almost sounded superfluous. And unlike Mira Calix, whose DJ set was alluring in its egoless focus on the music itself, Plaid themselves seemed extraneous. The most fascinating aspect of the artists’ presence onstage was the automated robot camera filming them as they twiddled knobs and rubbed their touchpads. Such is the dilemma of this music; with few exceptions, it still works best on record—whether in the comfort of a bedroom or the shuddering confines of a club.

music

Plaid

Nobukazu Takemura

Mira Calix

The Middle East

March 29