the middle east - club in cambridge
Hello anonymous CC readers! seriously, if you read this blog start commenting on our shit. make us feel good.
Last night I went down to Cambridge [I live in Boston now... COLLEGE] to see Baths open for Dosh and El Ten Eleven as part of an Anticon tour. Now, Dosh and El Ten Eleven were two groups I had never heard of... I was pretty much lured by my love for Will Wisenfeld (previous posts) and hoped to see him play. Even though I actually MISSED Baths' set (no one I was with knew they needed ID.. we had to go BACK to school and then return to the club seen above) I made it for the other two acts, which were simply amazing. I'll start with Dosh.
Dosh.
The premise of both Dosh and El Ten Eleven as acts is the use of sampling and effects pedals to complicate their music. Dosh is a one man act, although on stage he pretty much lives in a tightly packed circle that contains a drum set, two keyboards and a large mixer/sampler behind him plus lots of other things to augment his music. The effect is amazing. Dosh samples himself playing and loops whatever he just did using the many many different looping pedals scattered around his setup. In one song, he actually sampled his own voice, making a 'ch' sound with his teeth, and then looping that for the duration of the song while he built upon it with interesting synth lines, live drum beats and various other things. What he essentially creates is a beautiful wave of sound that sits in the room, letting you listen for all the different little loops that he drops in and out. Besides the complexity of the music, its amazing to watch him scramble around his setup jumping from one instrument to the next, watching his feet making calculated decisions about his looping and wondering about exactly what it is that he is doing up there. It truly is a live performance, even though he isn't physically producing all the sounds you can hear at the time you hear him. I highly recommend his album Wolves and Wishes, and he has a new album this year (Tommy) that I haven't listened to yet. Although I don't feel the recordings do justice to the complicated/interesting nature of his live sets, when you listen and remember that its just one guy doing everything, its amazing.
El Ten Eleven
El Ten Eleven were the headliners at the show, and like i said, were based on a similar concept to Dosh's. However El Ten Eleven is a two-man setup, one guitarist (on the left above) alternating between a double-necked guitar and a bass, and a drummer alternating between drum set and electric drum kit. The magic (besides the double-necked guitar) happens with all the pedals they use, for looping and a tremendous amount of effects. They have a fisheye camera set up above the pedals projecting behind them, so you can see what they are doing, and it makes an awesome backdrop. As you can probably guess, they are more rock-bent than Dosh, but they have two things in common: Pedals and Anticon. Anyway, they are very inventive and have excellent stage presence. They have a new album coming out (which they were presaling at the concert.. have yet to listen to it) which is called Its Still Like A Secret. Give 'em a listen below
PEACE sorry it took so long to get this post up
Here are some song samples:
///patkins///
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