Sunday, June 03, 2007

grass not ass

Date: 6/2/07
Location: Eckhart Park
Show: The Bel Eckhart Sound Experiment with Prefuse 73 and others
Drinks: Illegal
Cost: Free
Things I missed to be there: Sleeping late, eating well, exercise.
Reason for going: Those things are boring as shit


It was a nice lazy Saturday afternoon at Eckhart Park, if a weird one. Prefuse 73, which today included a half dozen knob twiddler, tweakers, and button pushers. It wasn't the environment I think of when I think of hip hop, what with a bunch of hipsters sitting like hippies cross-legged in the grass. They looked like they were appreciating the music but they weren't really feelin it. Same as when rock bands play in the sunlight, it's just this whole different, unnaturally danceless vibe.



The event didn't wholly make sense at all. I think it's because at various points in time, a number of bands were going to be involved that ended up falling through. One of the cooler parts of the show turned out to be the art installations provided by The Chicago Underground Library and The Ice Capades video series, which I hadn't really noticed, until the heavy metal cover band The Battle of Good Versus Evil took the stage, and I got restless.



In a small garden, The Chicago Underground Library planted word trees, which were little non-sequitirs taken from their colection of zines and chapbooks. A few feet away, The Ice Capades had built cardboard mutoscopes where you could watch various videos from their collection. When you looked through the viewfinder of one mutoscope, you were treated to a series of experimental works from their collection; when you looked through another, you could see animated shorts by the likes of Lilli Carré and others.

More than anything else these displays, especially the mutoscopes, helped the Sound Experiment live up to its name, and seem anything more than just a tiny neighborhood street fest.

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