What We're About
The WMC '07 Miami Guide gives an insider's peek at this year's Winter Music Conference, serving up daily event previews, DJ profiles, insider reports, and audio/video clips.
WMC Day 3: and justice was served!
A surreal party deserves an equally absurd entrance, so it's only fitting that we found ourselves rolling up to Saturday night's FIXED party — a nu-rave, filter-punk maelstrom featuring over-the-top headliners Digitalism and Justice — sprawled in the back of a stretch limo. A white stretch limo, at that. We're still not exactly sure how we managed to hitch that ride — friends dragged us out of the Spectral party, and there it was: gleaming, stretchy, and ours to be had all the way downtown for only $60, about the same our party of a dozen strong would have spent on cab fare.
If this new breed of distortion-heavy dance music had any doubters amidst the Flavorpill ranks, we found ourselves unanimous in our enthusiasm by the time Digitalism took the stage. Part of Paris' Kitsuné label, Digitalism are known for gritty hooks and a punky electro spirit, but their live set was something else entirely: a long, side-winding spiral of naturally unfurling beats and grinding sequences. The pop aspects of their approach fell away as they twisted up the music's constituent parts — intros, outros, verses, choruses, bridges, breakdowns, reprises, and codas, oh my — into a single entity, coiled and thrumming with static. The music was full of tricks, but there was no joking around, no irony: the urgency of their welling wall of sound felt more indebted to Pan Sonic than Kitsuné labelmates like Simian Mobile Disco.
As for Justice, we can only say that they meted it out with severity. The crowd thronging the DJ booth made it impossible to tell exactly what the Ed Banger marquis-toppers were doing, but their set was a mixture of Justice tracks and, towards the end, what sounded like custom edits of rock, pop, and hip-hop hits. We're not sure we've ever seen a crowd so willingly swept up into the palm of an artist's hand. Even more than Digitalism, Justice know how to manipulate a crowd, teasing us with hooks from their big tracks, leading us down a rabbit-hole detour of blocky beats, feints, and breakdowns, and then bringing back the main theme with all the subtlety of a buzz bomb. To chart the arc of the crowd's enthusiasm, you'd have to start plotting points at "mental," ratchet it up to "ape shit," and then invent your own adrenalinized superlatives lying far north of where the graph paper ends. Fists were pumping, throats were screaming themselves raw, people were fainting. (Really: a girl went down, grinning, right next to us.) By the time Justice snuck in Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name," we bid goodbye to everything we thought we knew about genre, aesthetics, and the limits of taste.
(One complaint: Justice, do you have to play so freaking loud? Your high end sheared off about 15% of our hearing, and we'd like it back.)
March 24, 2007, 08:34 PM
|
|