Location: Quennect Four
Show: MachineFest 2007/ The Freeform Shuffle
Bands: Condenada, Clique Talk, Black Bear Combo and SEARSTOWER
DJs: Kate and Rachel, 0+1=Everything
Cost: $5 or canned food donation
Drinks: BYO or $1 PBR
Things I Missed to Be There: Mayor Daley and Gays in the Military at Empty Bottle
Reason for going: I booked a shit-ton of my favorite acts for the show, so it's my party I can cry if I want to namean?
I hate almost everything about putting on shows at places other than my house. I have to care about when everybody loads in, I have to protect other people's stuff, and I have to keep three groups of people happy: the owners, the performers, and to a lesser extent, the audience. Still, when it works, it's fuckin sweet.
Pats on the back and comraderie. Beers in every direction. Soaked clothes and a bunch of stupid half-remembered conversations.
I don't know if the freeform Shuffle is going to keep working with Quennect Four, but our last show was great.
Condenada opened up the show as the sacrificial band, but by the time they finished up, they had a pretty good crowd. A few crusty traveler kids were stomping around and doing Karate Kid hardcore dance steps. I didn't get a huge punk crowd out on Wednesday, maybe because Condenada was the only group on the bill that fit that description, and they have a few shows coming up this weekernd, or maybe there was something else going on that I'd booked against. Either way, there was a good amount of folks there, punks or not. A few people put up their noses, but it looked like a lot of folks were having the same revelation:
That they still liked punk rock.
It's easy to forget that once you stop going to basement shows because you've gotten bored of seeing the same thing, or you've turned 21 or moved out of whatever small town you were living in, and all the stuff that's calling itself punk that people are actually hearing about is boring, either fashion-driven, stuck in the past, or both. I think it was good for these cats to see Condenada, a girl-band that wasn't selling sex, or even their sex, or even the politics of their sex. There were a lot of politics, but a lot of beer too. In a gallery space where stencils of Noam Chomsky, and right-on fisted Zapatistas overlook the stage, and the iconography gets too thick to take seriously it's good to be reminded as much as possible that political people can still get down.
Next up was SEARSTOWER, a project featuring Brenmar Someday and a cat by the name of David experimenting with electronics and eventually happening upon a kind of unconventional rhythm. It wasn't the most moving stuff I've ever heard, and was tilting more towards the Brenmar that does free jazz and avant garde hiphop than the one that does weirdo pop and dance music. While David, worked a table full of electronics I didn't recognize (or that, perhaps, the beer wiped from my memory), Brenmar was playing a turntable, and scratching the shit out of some poor anonymous records. That's about all I can really write about SEARSTOWER, because if I see 'em again, they'll probably sound completely different.
The band that really made the night work, was a band that always tends to make nights work. Instead of sending someone upstairs to collect the people who'd disappeared towards the smoking room, Black Bear Combo brought their instruments upstairs, played a song-and-a-half to pique our insterests, and announced they were going back to where the beer was. I've seen em pull this act before, but it always works, as everyone followed single-file downstairs like the band was some sort of a hipster Pied Piper. Soon the shirts started coming off and asses started shaking. Everyone fell into the band's gypsy brass like they were under some sort of an old world spell. It's poor writing etiquette to use that analogy after already name-checking the Pied Piper of Hamlin, but I'm obviously not that great of a writer.
The show was a bit of a clusterfuck, with all the action condensed into one floor. In between sets, Kate and Rachel (from WLUW's mega-awesome Old Style Show) split their time with 0+1=Everything, the first spinning a lot of old rock and soul and the second playing some downtempo electro and hiphop.
The night closed with Clique Talk, who did the same kind of new wavey dance rock they did when they were HeNotIn.
[0+1=Everything]
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