AMPLAB, ACIDS AND BASES, 47TH STAR
4/11/08 @ Hunab Hookah See Photos
What, so tobacco is OK now, even hip? I have no problem with that, I just find it curious.
As soon as I walked in the door it hit me. You know the way aromas can make a memory more immediate, more than a sight or sound? It wasn’t tobacco. I didn’t even notice any smoke but the overwhelming smell of incense. Zap! It brought me back : a kid venturing to St Mark’s Place Bookstore in Greenwich Village for underground newspapers, black light posters and rolling papers & pipe screens. The speed freak who recommended R. Crumb’s Despair comix to me. The lurid swirly day-glo paint peeling off the storefront. Actually, quite a bit of this show brought me back but more of that later.
Steaming bowl-size cups of chai and coffee. Three foot hookahs, their bowls full of tobacco flavored with cherry or (gag!) blueberry. Lots of soft sink-in couches, black light glow and enough over-stuffed pillows to cushion an Asian rhino. I don’t really get it. Pass me the opium though and I’m down.
We walked in on 47th Star, a lone guy playing downlow beats, tweaking knobs, dialogue loops and synth-y keys. Yup. It was the ol’ Apple notebook mix with more gear than an entire rock combo. Behind him were projections of classic Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation.
Music and random film clips? Sounds like light shows from San Francisco’s Family Dog collective or Fluxus artists like Al Hansen (Beck’s grandfather), George Maciunas and Nam June Paik mixing media like Betty Crocker does cakes.
Next was Acids and Basses, two guys with guitar, electronic loops, synths and sequences combined into (boy, it gets hard to describe this kind of stuff without using the same metaphors over and over) drones, uptempo beats (200 or 300 bpm? yeah!), downtempo beats, sci-fi themes/music of the spheres, theramin-in-a-wind-tunnel, Star Trek reruns and yes the inevitable whale noises.
Bet if I played a tape of this for you-- minus the bleepy-bloopy parts --and told ya it was old Grateful Dead space jams you’d probably like it less. I can’t defend Deadhead dancers but the Dead’s a better band than you think, given members’ backgrounds: guitarist Garcia (folk /blue-grass/ jazz) , bassist Lesh (classical/electronic/math)and songwriter Hunter (folk) which in one way or another adds up to what we have here. Definitely not the kind of music you want to slam tequila shots to. I was digging on the faster, darker stuff.
Next Amplab, along similar lines but more jazz-inflected with guitar, 5-string bass, drums and keyboards that at times brought sounds forth like vibraphone, nose flute (look it up) and an aberrant pinball machine. Rhythm and melody were in (purposeful) short supply which loses me a bit since those are my bread n’ butter. A little Chick Webb drumming intro’s were welcome. Then the A & B guys joined in for a free-love/ free-for-all Mahavishnu/Dead/Anita O’Day trippy jam-o-rama, thick as space marmalade spread on galactic toast. Sorry, that’s a mouthful. Must’ve been a contact high from that blueberry smoke, the legal Purple Haze.
