Date: 6/14/07
Location: Spot 6
Show: The Freeform Shuffle
Bands: The Gravetones, Grace Kulp, and Magic is Kuntmaster
DJs: Brianne, Arvo Fuckhead, and DJ Demchuk
Cost: $5
Drinks: Best to pregame it down the street at Twisted Spoke's Whiskey Wednesdays
Things I missed to be there: David Diarreah, Rotten Milk at The Compound; Bike-In Movie at Heaven Gallery; Caution Wednesdays with Accidental People, Daryl Pure, Martin Stoy, Theo-G, Osiris, K'nex, Vinnie Accardo, Jackie Neon, and Malafaktor at Spybar
Back when I had a big pink mohawk, I used to go to goth nights around town, thinking maybe I'd have a chance with some of those exquisite living dead girls, the kind who would always make my heart skip a beat with their harlequin faces and tits all over the place in vinyl and leather. No luck. The punks and the death rockers hadn't been on the same team since back when Medusa's closed down, and i was still scraping my knees on jungle gyms. Eventually I got tired of it. The few friends I made, I would see elsewhere, and all that was left was expensive drinks and bad industrial music.
I could never afford to look the part, but I've always felt an affinity to the scene. All that melodrama; all that theater and poetry. Absinthe and lace. Lewis Carroll and Edward Gorey. And death. Lots of death.
Beautiful inevitable death.
Tonight was the Freeform Shuffle's first Death Nite. It was a unique event, in that the night was inherently goth, and so were the bands, but they came from all over the goth spectrum, completely skipping over, if sometimes grazing, the industrial genre.
First up was Magic is Kuntmaster, a beautiful woman who filled the room with strobe lights and fog while blasting out music along the lines of Panicsville and Insect Deli, with grinding synths, tape loops, and creepy vocoder experiments. She was an indicator of what was to come throughout the night, and what already was, namely theater and melodrama.
Magic is Kuntmaster used her props to suffocate us with noise, light, and smoke, to the point where if we didn't have someone to touch, we were completely alone, and that's how I experienced most of her set, misty and half blind, trying to focus my eyes on a thrashing silhouette who for all the flashes, may have been beating up some celestial body. We were listening to the epileptic death knell of the moon, or something like it.
Upstairs, people milled about in the finally-tolerable night air, smoking cigarettes and personally fuming. Magic is Kuntmaster arrived late, and the Dead Superheroes Orchestra cancelled, but instead of rearranging the set, the show just waited (in the way that death waits for us all? sure, that's an alright metaphor I guess.).
A lot of people were angry, but not me. The show started late enough for me not to miss anything. The DJ was playing Nick Cave's "The Curse of Millhaven", followed by Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead" and Miss Kitten's "Frank Sinatra".
While Magic is Kuntmaster loaded up her Mini-Pink Floyd setup, Grace Kulp unloaded an awe-inspiring set. They unpacked a few curved blac slats of wood. They brought their own stage.
"Has the second band even started yet?"
"Almost. They're putting up a fish net in front of them."
I don't know if I ever heard as impressed a groan as I heard from the milling-about members of the headlining Gravetones. I don't know if Grace Kulp expected to get paid, or how much money the show may have raked in, but I can't remember a time when I'd seen a middle band put so much effort into dressing their set.
It gave people a chance to get intrigued (if annoyed), and time to smoke their cigarettes, before returning.
Some people knew what to expect, and some didn't. I've written about Grace Kulp's dark wave folk music before, played on an electric acoustic with Peter Murphy's voice, but it's still pretty impressive.
The last band was The Gravetones, one of the bigger names on the local psychobilly scene. Starting with their guitarist's soundcheck of Naked Raygun's "Rat Patrol", the band were consummate crowd-pleasers. Flanked by a backing band of regular dudes ripping out one-at-a-time the Gravetones singer had an Elvis look to him, were Elvis to simultaneously return as a bloated zombie and the voodoo priest who'd conjured him. Their set drew more encores than they were ready for, with foot stomps, hand clap, circle pits, and singalongs. They were a bit bitter about performing last, well past the midnight hor, but no one else could have followed them and held the crowd.
It was a good night. It was a good night to die.
No comments:
Post a Comment