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Ladytron. Photo courtesy of Girle action Media and Marketing.
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Gather ’Round, Adventurous Music Listeners
Adventurous music listeners have a lot to be thankful for this November: Intriguing music of the genre-busting — or genre-generating — variety by Asian, Asian Pacific American and Asian British performers abounds. While everyone in the mainstream music industry is busy wringing their hands, whining about the state of records sales and blaming file sharing programs and piracy, artists who skate along the edges of pop cult are doing as well as ever, if not better. It’s an unusually good time to catch challenging music — mostly because the media, the labels and the listeners are all looking for it. Those old pop formulas aren’t as foolproof as some might have thought, and the time is right for a major change. These upcoming Bay Area shows should do the trick for some sonic seekers.
BLACK DICE
The members of Black Dice make their hep stomping grounds of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sound like a trippy place to be. After chasing their own tails as full-tilt noise rockers, these former Rhode Island School of Design students — guitarist Bjorn Copeland, bassist/electronics/tape manipulator Aaron Warren, drummer/vocalist Hisham Bharoocha (former singer of Lightning Bolt) and cohort vocalist/electronic percussionist Eric Copeland — sound more like CalArts surfer boys than East Coast nature lovers. Consider the recurring found sounds of lapping waves on their debut full-length, Beaches & Canyons, on Brooklyn’s much-buzzed-about DFA label. Sun-baked psychedelia makes the final grade, amid the primal noise freakouts, percussive yelps, droning electronics, grinding treated guitar and throbbing beats, all of which bear down on your brow like a migraine that won’t quit — or like the fierce flicker of an archangel’s wings. This disk is alive with the sound of the squeaky wheels that rotate in minds fractured by short-attention-span punk and free-jazz improv. All in all, the 60-minute “double album” is a mind-bending brew. And the band should be essential listening/viewing for art punks, experimento types and post-rockers this week when Black Dice drops into the Bay Area.
THE EVENING
The spawn of the San Francisco State music department, Patrik Sklenar and Lee Burik take their noise guitar experiments out more and more often — they were last seen performing to a packed room at the Café du Nord. Accompanied by a punchy crew — accomplished bassist Zach Brewer, agile drummer Brian Kim and Supertramp vocalist Roger Hodgson-soundalike Matt Rist — Evening seems to get better and better all the time, moving from goth-prog to no-wavey dissonance to something wickedly unclassifiable. Sklenar and Burik’s jazz backgrounds show in their off-kilter melodies and odd time signatures. If there is such a thing as Dark Wave (that subgenre supposedly sparked by the Faint), then San Francisco’s Evening could be its softer, gentler Left Coast proponents, carrying on the shadowy carnival in the wake of present and former Bay Area malcontents such as Pleasure Forever and the Rapture.
MAD CAPSULE MARKETS
Picking up where metal beatmeister Rob Zombie and digital hardcore savants Atari Teenage Riot left off, Japanese trio Mad Capsule Markets have hit it big on the charts of their native country a dozen years and a dozen albums into their existence. Welding the heavy noise wallop of Japan’s experimental rock with the manic techno tempos of Berlin’s cacophonous cronies, Mad Capsule Markets made their stateside debut back in 1995 in San Francisco (where they mixed their 1996 album, 4 Plugs) and went on to hold their own at Ozzfest and open for bands such as Rage Against the Machine. Now they come outfitted with Palm Pictures’ recent reissue of their 1999 album, OSC-DIS (Oscillator in Distortion), which is packaged with a bonus DVD in addition to the group’s smash Japanese singles, “Pulse” and “Good Girl” (featured on a TV commercial and dedicated to drummer Motokatsu Miyagami’s infant daughter). Stormtrooper costumes and breakneck thrash set for maximum distortion — with the occasional Ramones-style sing-along chorus — who woulda thunk? This year’s mad market just may be ready for it.
LADYTRON
Liverpool foursome Ladytron embodies the future according to Kraftwerk, Grace Jones and other 1980s hypermodernists. They have the same robotic cool, crafting majestic synths, spreading the disaffected — and effects-laden — girlish vocals around on their second album, Light and Magic, co-produced and mixed by Beck engineer Mickey Petralia, with contributions by other B-boy familiars like Justin Meldal-Johnson and Roger Manning Jr. Electro pop before electroclash attempted a nationwide upstaging, Ladytron values musical substance and pop craftsmanship over their very substantial style and, of course, that makes all the difference. The ladies — namely Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo — project a sub-zero cool and a knowing yet infectious wit — see tunes such as “Seventeen” — and the entire band, including Reuben Wu and Daniel Hunt, makes buzzing, propulsive orchestral maneuvers in the dark that hint at something beyond the chilly, shiny surfaces. Wu will make a DJ appearance on Nov. 22, dipping into a record bag that mixes the THX trailer overture with Green Velvet, Lords of Acid and Vitalik.
Black Dice performs Nov. 8 with Get Hustle, Birdsaw and Red Bennies at Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. Showtime is 9:30 p.m. Price is $8. Call 415-474-0365. Black Dice also plays Nov. 9 with the Mass at the Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. Showtime is 9:30 p.m. Price is $8. Call 510-841-2082.
The Evening appears Nov. 11 with the Scene Creamers and We Never Landed on the Moon at Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. Showtime is 9 p.m. Price is $8. Call 415-474-0365.
Mad Capsule Markets plays Nov. 14 with Finger Bangerz at Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. Showtime is 8 p.m. Price is $10. Call 415-522-0333.
Ladytron’s Reuben Wu performs Nov. 22 at Club Fake at the Cat Club, 1190 Folsom St., S.F. Call 415-703-8964.
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