MillionYoung did that move, and the crowd went mad. At that moment, pressing the space bar on the laptop felt like the summation of five thousand years of tool-making in one gesture, an elegant gesture that contained a history that spiraled out from the primitive bone hit that starts 2001 to the odyssey of the space shuttle. It was an emblem of both our greatest engineering achievements and the sublime, tribal-washed magic of something unnatural, beyond comprehension.
And yet the sound feels so natural. In the club, at Mercury Lounge on March 7, 2009, we know the moment is coming the way we know the waves are coming back to wash over our feet, and the way we know they’ll get steadily bigger as the moon waxes; we expect it, and even if the tide washes us out, we’ll sit there on the beach and wait for it, if for no other reason than awe, even at something as simple as that. That’s what it feels like when MillionYoung, in between strums of his electric guitar, leans in slowly to his laptop and presses one key, and a beat kicks in, completely expected and yet wholly new, like the pulse of a freshly discovered quasar, a million years young. He does the move, and we’re all moving.
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That set the stage for Pictureplane, who got behind a table covered in a generous amount of sparkly gold cloth and turntables. He was hidden in the dark, but quickly given away by the four vertical LED light posts that divided him from the audience. While they scanned a rainbow, lights above added to his neon trimmed clothes a constant glowing outline of red yellow and blue. The effect was neat – a lone, angular figure dancing over a couple of machines on a digital banquet table video, and he looked more like a flat digital projection than a figure; outlined in the RGB spectrum, Pictureplane was a 3D video seen without glasses. The music was similarly hypnotizing and bewildering: between the hard lines of a Tron world and the softness of a nighttime garden walk, or what he described as ‘vampires in love in outer space’.
But it was Small Black that turned the walk into a saunter, and the garden into a field, spreading out beneath a garden of nebulae. The lo-fi duo – one of them Juan Pieczanski, of Juan’s Basement fame – was joined by two others who enriched the digital/analog mix, starting with the epic “‘Weird Machines’”
We stepped outside for air and when we returned, the minor planetarium had turned into space, and we were staring into the center of the galaxy. On stage was the noodly monolith of Ernest Greene, aka Washed Out, who was manning the decks like Grandmaster Flash must have done, like Buzz Aldrin must have done. The entire room was moving to the fleshy fuzzy beat of a drum that defined, somehow, the meaning of phat (weird, I know). It was the kind of sound that makes you want to collapse or float. So you do both, and so too does the strobe behind Greene. An entrancing, radiating LED ring of fire hanging in the dark behind him entranced the entire room, and seemed to warp it too, like a black hole at the world’s last disco, or an emergency sign on an on ramp to the information superhighway.
To the initiated it was little surprise when Small Black clambered onstage, amidst shouts of “Juan! Juan! Juan!” But we felt like we were bearing witness to the formation of some rock supergroup. The universe seemed to shrink to the size of the Mercury Lounge, and then it started all over again with a big bang. By the time the show ended with the epic “Feel it All Around,” time may have stopped. The sound of technology again, for the first time.
The whole time Ernest’s vocals were just no help: they sounded miles away and lost in the wash of sublime static. The only earthly words that were distinguishable weren’t even sung; they were the titles of his albums, “Life of Leisure” and “High Times.” These were like passwords for this whole world’s content management system. We hacked in.
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