When a concert at Portland venue Wonder Ballroom manages to sell out weeks in advance of the show, it can only mean one thing: the most zeitgeisty of artists must be coming to town. And sure enough, when it was announced that James Blake would be making his second appearance in as many years at the magnificent east side venue, tickets went quicker than expected. If nothing else, it proves that James Blake’s new album was a success.
This might come off as a bit fanboyish — but Django Django is the best band you probably haven’t seen live yet.I’ve made no secret about my love for the quartet from the English isles, and a cancellation on their performance at Iceland Airwaves only furthered my anticipation. Like everyone else in the Neptune Theater on a rainy Tuesday evening in Seattle, I eagerly waited and waited for Django Django’s jangly take on psych-electronic influenced rock — a wait which first began since KEXP started blasting “Default” nearly 15 months ago.
March 19th, 2013 @ Neptune Theatre, Seattle, WA
Night Moves
Django Django chose Minneapolis-based Night Moves, fresh off of a whole lot of good press for the brand new band. The quartet, using a little bit of odd samples and pre-recorded instrumentation, looked like veterans for the crowd, channeling their inner-Portugal. The Man as they delivered a psych-rock set that would make any Deadhead proud. The band, however, isn’t prone to senseless noodling; they kept their set nice and tight for an opener, and sounded much more polished than you would expect.
DJANGO DJANGO / NIGHT MOVES LIVE SHOW REVIEW CONTINUES BELOW
for 2013, we’re bringing SXSW coverage into our personal lives. Rather than writing up simple show reviews, we hope to present to you an uncensored portrait of our exceptional 3-way mind-meld, as we navigate through the chaos that is SXSW in our own manic, sarcastic, and profound ways. Mostly, we talk about food, document idiosyncrasies, review music… and bring it all home with more talk about food.
REDEFINE’s third unofficial SXSW house party went off with minimal hitches, as usual. With 1,250 free beers from Dos Equis with which to lubricate showgoers, we created a musical oasis in the midst of corporate SXSW chaos, full of good vibes, good music, and real human beings. Below is a brief recap of the day’s festivities.
They say that watching a master at work lights up the same regions of the brain as if you were executing the work yourself. That is to say – if you were to watch a tennis champion win Wimbledon with an EKG glued to your temples, it would be as if you were playing tennis yourself. Masters, experts, geniuses… pinnacles of human achievement. They show us what is possible.
Inspiration is essential in an age of uncertainty, when it seems like we’re living at the bottom of a gravity well of despair, where everything is conspiring to dull your shine, to make you docile and easily controllable. When you feel like everything you see and hear is a copy of a copy of a copy, endlessly degraded, it is refreshing to find an unbroken thread of Illumination. Brilliance is not easily marketable.
But then you have the Jerusalem Quartet, that have dedicated their lives to sawing away at wooden boxes stretched taut with catgut. It would be preposterous if it weren’t so beautiful. The ambitious young quartet, who has been described by The Strad as “one of the young, yet great quartets of our time,” have undertaken to perform all 15 of Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartets.
Grouper is a dark star of the Portland experimental scene. She hardly needs any introduction, but her records have hypnotized international audiences for years, yet she remains somewhat aloof from the local music scene. She DOES pop up, from time to time, making sporadic and memorable appearances, often times at small, inexpensive events. Saturday evening’s performance was part of Reed College’s Art Week; an early, free all-ages show in Reed College’s Chapel.
March 9th, 2013 @ Reed College’s Eliot Hall in Portland, OR
The theme was REVERIE (a topic close to my heart), and this was their goal:
“We see it as an opportunity to consider the fluidity of the aesthetic and physical dispositions by which we situate ourselves. To experience REVERIE is to become dislocated, excised from the familiar and submerged in the irrational.” – from the RAW website
