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The Rendezvous . Seattle, WA
Reviewed by John Gillanders on 02/18
Tagged 2010 ambient drone du hexen hase midday veil moon duo psychedelic san francisco bands seattle bands wooden shjips
Sensing a void in the organization and prevalence of psychedelic music in Seattle, local collective Portable Shrines (
www.portableshrines.com) has really stepped up their effort in the last couple of years to not only lure better-known national psych bands to the area, but to also congeal a legitimate "scene" from where previously only a handful of disparate acts co-existed rather incongruously. Their efforts culminated in last September's brilliantly mind bending Escalator Fest, which was the most precisely focused canon of entheogen-inspired art and music to project it's swirling visage into the cosmos from these parts in quite some time.
Tonight marked somewhat of a return to Seattle for that festival's headliners Wooden Shjips, albeit in their side project configuration of Moon Duo. I showed up a bit late and was initially kind of dumbstruck as I sauntered up to the bar and ordered a beer. "Where the fuck is everyone?" I thought to myself. This show got written up in both of the major alternative weeklies, so I was expecting a good turnout, but the place was pretty much a ghost town. As I made my way back to the Jewel Box Theater, I was even more astounded to find the room packed nearly beyond capacity. Now the main reason I mention this, is that in Seattle, typically every well-hyped indie rock or metal show I've been to at The Rendezvous has had the exact opposite kind of thing going on -- where the bar is packed with fashionable scenesters and like, ten people are actually watching the bands that they supposedly came to see. This is always a depressing reality to confront if you're a musician; as much as you care about "the music", for a lot of people (even a lot of musicians), a show is just somewhere you go to look cool and party.
But here the inverse was afoot. Brilliant visuals by Aubrey Nehring flickered behind Du Hexen Hase as they dropped an ambient swath of droning mind fuckery on an eager crowd, a lot of whom were sitting down patiently in front of the stage, letting the over-stimulating onslaught of high-end technicolor weirdness paint sprawling vistas on the infinite canvas of their mind's eye. Or maybe that's my interpretation. I've always hoped that what Portable Shrines was doing was bringing an element of spirituality back to the rock show. I could think of this as little more than solipsistic optimism on my end, but here were a bunch of kids intently turning themselves inward rather than straining their heads to be seen for once.
Next up were Moon Duo. Now I could call bullshit on Moon Duo for essentially being Wooden Shjips with a cute keyboard player and a drum machine rather than a backing band, but when you've got something that works, why not stick with it? I could listen to Ripley from the Shjips' blissed out guitar skree for an eternity before it ever even began to get old. Trance rock is the name of the game in that camp and a trance the duo did induce. I wondered if I was going to have spontaneous visions of coiling serpents (a metaphor for DNA?) like I did at Escalator fest, but no dice. Instead I settled for channeling the hypnotic visuals projected behind the band into my own headspace, using the potency of the music as a means to psychically manipulate them into pre-designed hyper-sigils.
You know a band's music has had the desired effect when you have a tough time pulling yourself back to semi-normal consciousness, and in chatting with Rendezous booker Adam Noble Bass (big supporter of the local psych scene as of late) after the set, I several times lost my train of thought to the echoing feedback still pleasantly reverberating in my head.
Next up was Midday Veil, who are, in my mind, Seattle's most promising new band. The crowd thinned out a bit, which was a shame, because The Veil broke off yet another potently mystical expanse of apparently all new material. This is a particularly astonishing feat considering that I'd just seen them in December and November and have 3 of their albums; yet, they still didn't run through anything I'd heard before. It all came off predictably brilliant despite some minor technical issues, and further raised the fervor for their first studio album (which should be out soon) to a fever pitch, in my mind. As previously mentioned, what I like about watching a band like Midday Veil is the sense that something different is going on.
Typically, most people go to a rock show to get drunk and numb themselves to the tedious drudgery of modern existence, but at a good Portable Shrines show, you get the impression that you're being coerced into an uplifting dimension of pure consciousness and wonder. You could argue that it's just another way to escape the horrors of the world, but in my mind, it's a far superior one.
what do you think?
