Plaidophile

Basically I was messing around with last.fm for the first time in years (I don't know how long it's been exactly but let's just say that the last time I used it, AudioScrobbler was an experimental separate site and last.fm was more a compendium of bands without the social networking aspects and so on) and while I was repopulating my new profile with music (as well as uploading a few Sockpuppet tracks for good measure) I decided to dink around with the concert listings stuff. And lo and behold, there was a listing for Plaid, an abstract electronica group (meaning two people) I actually like rather a lot. And they were playing at Mezzanine, which is about 3 blocks from my apartment.

Of course I really hate going to things alone (due primarily to my agoraphobia) so in desperation I contacted a bunch of my local friends, and a couple of them (Rachael and Mark) were interested but didn't want to commit to it (Rachael also being somewhat agoraphobic in a similar way to me, and Mark having a bit of a ways to go to get here). Then out of the blue, Mark got a text message from another friend about it, and were he and his girlfriend interested in coming along? So that cemented it for all of us.

The show was comprised of two DJs taking turns off to the side, then Mr. Projectile doing a set (which was okay but a bit underwhelming; he'd might as well have just been playing a CD for all we could see him doing), followed by another DJ set which very nicely segued into Plaid's set. It was hard to tell what exactly they were doing either, although their music was, of course, quite good, and they also put on quite an excellent visual show as part of it. (I have a feeling that one of them was picking looping song segments in Logic while the other was dinking around with Quartz Composer.)

I did recognize a couple of the tracks, although the only one I knew by name was Faster, and which was significantly different from the album version (or at least the version whose arrangement was shipped as sample content in Logic) so even if they were just picking out prearranged loop segments at least they weren't just recreating the CD while doing it.

I'm still not totally sold on electronic musicians who basically just bring a laptop to a show and dink around on that. Performers like Blake Lewis who are clearly performing the music and building it up in realtime are much more impressive without needing so much of a set piece.

A few years ago, Marcus, Spud and I saw Rilo Kiley in Seattle, and one of the opening acts was Feist (who is now of course well-known for having the song on the ad for the Fat Nano). At the time I wasn't terribly impressed because she was just kind of messing around with a loop pedal and had a very low-key small set in the middle of two very big acts, but in retrospect what she did was quite awesome, especially with how she involved the audience in the loops in some parts. (Her set was completely out of place but in a different context it would have been very <3-worthy.) With more polish you can get something incredible, as KT Tunstall shows us.

I'm a big fan of exploration in music but that exploration shouldn't end at the recording studio. Trying to figure out how to replicate the studio environment in a live environment is somewhat missing the point.

That said, as a DJ set goes, Plaid's performance was pretty danged awesome, and the overall experience was quite good. It's nice that I finally took advantage of the fact that I live basically in the middle of the nightlife capital of San Francisco. I will have to do this somewhat more often.