Location: Spot 6
Bands: Locrian, Detholz!, Plastic Crimewave Sound, and DJs Arturo VS. Johnny Kesh and Andy Ortmann
Cost: 5 dollar suggested
Things I missed to be there: Surprisingly little, all the regular wednesday night residencies.
At this point, I've written a fair amount on The Freeform Shuffle at Spot 6, put on weekly by my friends Arvo Fuckhead and DJ Demchuk. Previously, the show would feature music by one band, three djs, and the two hosts at the start and end of the night, but the reopening of Spot 6's basement allows for a new standard of three bands downstairs and the upstairs DJs, a little more time to stretch their legs. This alleviates some problems (dance party kids don't have to sit through an experimental cabaret act), and creates a few more (when Arturo and Kesh started spinning, the peoplen who'd gone downstairs had no idea).
The basement, which is a fairly raw, unfinished area with an untended bar, some plush couches that used to live at the bar next door, and numerous elictrical tape demons stuck on the walls). The first band to christen it was Locrian, an intense, two-man outfit that did some ear splitting, wall of noise shit, that drove the first wave of curious drinkers back upstares as quickly as they came down. My ears could only take about ten minutes of the assaults before I gave up on it, but the noise crowd seemed to be getting off on it, nodding their heads and making appreciative jazz faces.
Upstairs the battle started with a whitelabel remix of Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good" and continued on an electro, hip hop, dance punk tangent.
The Detholz! took the stage second, as a sort of secret pre-release party for their new album. It was my first time seeing them, and I'd been led to believe they were sillier than they actually were. They weren't really that silly though, just fun. It was as if they'd taken the all the fun parts out of every era of rock'n'roll from prog to glam to metal to new wave, with frenetic keyboards, cowbells and woodblocks, dueling guitars, quick solo bursts and novelty songs. This was a show for their big time fans, who came in fairly large numbers to whip their heads and shake their asses. They were fun (how could they not be?) but after half a set of songs that weren't really grounded in anything, I got curious about what my friends were doing upstairs.
When I got there, they were the only ones upstairs, not counting Arturo and Johnny. My friend Tyree was all kinds of high and fiending for a dance party --which they were happy to provide-- so the five or six of us started bumping and grinding in the corner by the door where DJ Demchuk was collecting money, alternatingly advertising to and driving away all possible walk-in clients. We thought the party would have to end when Andy Ortmann took over.
Andy Ortmann is the head of Nihilist Records, and has helmed any number of experimental noise acts. A recent flyer described him as "the Chicago noise royalty behind Panicsville" which was probably as apt as it was tongue-in-cheek. I tried describing his usual sound to one of my friends as someone "whose instruments break so he starts throwing them into the amps until everything shorts out or there's a feedback explosion." We were all therein presently surprised when he spun an all-disco set full of songs I've never heard of, plus Klus Nomi's "Simple Man" and something I'm pretty sure came off of one of Giorgio Moroder's Munich Machine albums.
Plastic Crimewave Sound is a band that has at various points in time been filled with noise royalty and scene celebrity, from the aforementioned Andy Ortmann to Cat Chow the only person as likely to appear in Chicago Social as Chicago Antisocial, with guest performers like Josephine Foster, Chris Connelly, and Michael Yonkers. PCS isn't a noise band though; they're a psychedelic act on the fringes of the New Weird America.
They're headed up by Steve Krakow, aka Plastic Crimewave, the man behind the comic strip "The Secret History of Chicago Music", the beautiful zine Galactic Zoo Dossier, and the Million Tongues Festival. Formerly he was that guy at the Wicker Park Reckless with the Salvador Dali moustache and perpetually the owner of the best tight pants in Chicago. Steve Krakow is a real lover of things, who collects long-lost records and antique toys the same way he collects famous weirdos to work with and his band is both a museum, a tribute to, and a continuation of the psychedelic sounds that he loves.
When I saw them at A Million Tongues, they bored the shit out of me. When I saw them today (with new member Nick D'Vyne of the band Vee Dee), they were pretty fun. Their music was all fuzzed out blues rock with extreme space echoes, mixed with something that kinda sounded like The Melvins would, if recorded by Phil Spector.
They brought the night down well, and the future looked better for the Shuffle than it ever has.
No comments:
Post a Comment