Nihilist Party, Fine Mist, London Drugs and gr8-2000 @ Little Mountain Studios

So this show at Little Mountain Studios last night was sparsely attended, probably because there were three other good shows going on last night. Still for those who made it the event was well received.

gr8-2000 (a.k.a. Tom Whalen) organized the event with Nihilist Party (a.k.a that guy named Scott with dreads whose at lots of shows). He plays high-energy electro music, heavy on synth noises with a solid beat, on his laptop while singing with his distorted vocals running through an FX pedal. The energy of his music doesn't just come from the noisy, while simultaneously dancey stuff, Tom composes, but also from his performance. Despite the fact that there were only about 15 people there early enough to see him Tom he gave it. Unfortunately his back was to the audience the whole time, which is always a bit annoying. On a side note I'm pleased to announce that gr8-2000 will be playing with Nü Sensae and Petroleum By-Products at the Astoria on May 6 for Discorder. Tell your friends!

London Drugs (who I can't find a link for) played second and I was very pleasantly surprised. They were described to me as "dueling Gameboys," which is an accurate description. When I was told this though I expected them to sound really gimmicky heavy on the retro Gameboy noises, but this was not the case. You couldn't even tell that this pair of young guys were making their music on a pair of Nintendo Gameboy DSs until someone brought out a table for them so they could play facing the audience. I had discussed the theory of the DS as an instrument between friends at length and seeing someone actually take a Gameboy and make fun dance music on it was really cool.

Fine Mist came on and despite Megan McDonald's complaint of suffering from a cold they were in fine form. Pretty '80s synth pop, it doesn't really sound very modern, but it does sound good. By this time the majority of people had showed up and the room felt full enough for people to start dancing. I've seen Megan and Jay Arner play on numerous occasions, and I'm glad to see they've got a bit of a following going. They played some new stuff, which sounded quite good and spiced up the list of now familiar songs like "I Can't Stand It," "In the Moonlight" and the one about meeting in the middle.

Closing the night out was Nihilist Party. I hadn't seen him play before, but he has a similiar style to gr8-2000. He plays beats off an iPod, while singing... really weird lyrics. He only played a couple songs so the event could end on time. I didn't really form a complete opinion of his stuff in that short time, but I'd see it again. Dude has a rad jacket decorated with googly eyes.

Afterwords I went to the upstairs of the Biltmore for karaoke and was surprised to find the place busy. I bring this up because some musicians from the other shows had all met up here and the guy from Vincat was an awesome karaoke performer. I will try to see them play not karaoke in the future.

None of my photographer friends came out last night so I'm using an old image. This is an old picture of Fine Mist playing at La Casa Del Artista. They were wearing the exact same clothing last night. Courtesy of Steve Louie.

Viision Quest at VIVO

Last night I went down to Video In/Video Out (VIVO) to check out Viision Quest, and well... some of it was good. The evening was divided into three parts shown as a video screening. This night would have been a lot better as a gallery showing where the audience was not forced to sit through some video shorts which would have been a lot better mounted on a wall in the background.

I'll start with the best of the evening which was the closers with a live video DJing performance by Haunted Beard (Ben Jacques) and Jessica Parsons of DNGROUS ADDRESS. (edit: I learned that Jessica was doing all the VJing and Ben was making noises) They were joined by Justin of Arbour Lake Sghool Collective and GR8-2000 (Tom Whalen) whose roles I'm a little uncertain of, but Tom definitely had a keytar. This was easily the best part of the evening. The live performance they put together was heavy on repeated abstract images in which you could occasionally make out children riding unicorns from an old cartoon, a cat running around and a CGI man walking. Their video was accompanied by jammy electro noise music which was pleasant in the style of Black Moth Super Rainbow though not as catchy. Haunted Beard's usual stuff I would describe as grotesque art rejected from a children's picture book/cartoon. DNGROUS ADDRESS work is usually a well-crafted found art video montage that usually is accompanied by DJs. I like both their individual projects though I didn't feel like they added up to the sum of their parts last night, still worth checking out if you're into that sort of thing.

I honestly wish I had not showed up on time even though it was free. When I see video shorts (or anything really) I hope to see things that will make me say, "I wish I'd thought of doing that" and/or "I wish I knew how to do that." What made up this first third of the evening brought neither of those thoughts to mind. The best of this portion of the evening I would have liked to have seen in a gallery setting so I could sip my drink, glance at the piece, say what I liked about it and then move on.

The second portion of the evening had some redeeming qualities. Young Forever Parts 1 and 2 were funny if a little heavy on the absurdism (It did however contain Alphaville's "Forever Young" for which I awarded it bonus points). It closed with an incredibly detailed stop-motion hand-crafted cityscape which was pretty cool, if not necessarily exciting. I believe it was called Wurld (Abridged) should you ever get the chance to see it.

Viision Quest logo lifted from the VIVO website.