Tag Archives: Krautrock

Space Rock Lift-Off: Hypnotikon, Reviewed (Photo Gallery)

Lumerians.
Lumerians.
Cave.
Jetman Jet Team.
Jetman Jet Team.
Night Beats.
Night Beats.
Cloudland Canyon.
Silver Apples.
Silver Apples.
Silver Apples.
Silver Apples.

Psychedelic Druids: Fungal Abyss at Hypnotikon 2013. (Photo: Tony Kay)

Happy nightmare, baby: Midday Veil's Emily Pothast. (Photo: Tony Kay)

Lumerians: Cubicle moles open the eye of the Cosmos. (Photo: Tony Kay)

(Photo: Tony Kay)

Groove rock gone lysergic: Cave at Hypnotikon. (Photo: Tony Kay)

Jetman Jet Team at Jet City's Hypnotikon. (Photo: Tony Kay)

(Photo: Tony Kay)

Danny Lee Blackwell, guitar freakout specialist in Night Beats. (Photo: Tony Kay)

(Photo: Tony Kay)

Cloudland Canyon bring the colors. (Photo: Tony Kay)

How do you like them: Silver Apples close(s) out Hypnotikon 2013. (Photo: Tony Kay)

(Photo: Tony Kay)

(Photo: Tony Kay)

(Photo: Tony Kay)

I’ve spent much of this week in such an un-exotic framework of mundane necessity, it’s almost obscured my memories of last week’s Hypnotikon Fest at the Triple Door. Almost.

Musically, Seattle’s first sorta major Psych Rock Festival couldn’t be faulted, as local and national psychedelic acts plied their surreal, sometimes symphonic currents of musical noise. The venue itself, though, ultimately felt a bit unwieldy. Psychedelic music, by its nature, is designed to immerse a listener, so the Triple Door’s spacious digs, spread-out tables, and supper-club ambience muted the heady ambience generated by the music. On the plus side, it imbued the air with a strange sense of decadence, as though spectators were upper-crust Roman senators watching holy fools and minstrels play for their amusement. On the flip side, it distanced the audience from music that’s normally gloriously interactive.

But there are worse things in life than not being jammed next to a massive PA in a crush of standing, surging people in a sweaty nightclub. And I come to praise Hypnotikon, not bury it.

Fungal Abyss opened up Hypnotikon Day 1 with expansive free-form jams steeped deeply in ambient noise. Melodies bobbed in and out of the atmosphere like a handful of jewels at the bottom of a dark lagoon, and the band displayed a gift for making their musical tangents feel like envelope-pushing invention, not simple wankery. Midday Veil, meantime, deepened my band crush on ‘em with another heady set. Few psych rock bands get so unabashedly experimental, yet still emerge with solid pop hooks. Singer Emily Pothast should be permitted to stir the dreams and haunt the nightmares of everyone in earshot with her voice and almost kabuki theatrical sense.

Wondrous things sometimes come in the unlikeliest packages, and Lumerians, Hypnotikon’s third mainstage act last Friday, more than demonstrated that truism. The San Francisco outfit looked more like a bunch of Silicon Valley cubicle moles than psychedelic explorers, which gave their percussive, throbbing space rock the unexpected punch of a Stealth Bomber. If there’d have been a dance floor, there wouldn’t have been an unshaken booty in the house. Last but surely not least, Cave’s largely instrumental groove rock moved with concise purpose, even as they spattered the momentum with sprays of keyboard whirrs and movie-soundtrack richness. Over in the Musiquarium Lounge, Tokyoidaho offered a terrific set of shoegazer pop, anchored by Peter Marchese’s resonant baritone voice (I missed Ecstatic Cosmic Union’s Musiquarium performance).

Saturday night drew a larger crowd, probably due to the presence of psych-rock legend Silver Apples. Happily, the three preceding mainstage acts offered plenty of pleasures of their own.

Seattle shoegazers Jetman Jet Team crafted one stellar (literally and metaphorically) effort with their recent full-length, We Will Live the Space Age. Live, they were a joyous surprise, vaulting into unknown territory with a set of unfamiliar (but still hooky and vast) material played with a recklessness not always present on Space Age’s carefully-constructed pop framework. And speaking of recklessness, Texas transplants Night Beats laid down some seriously vicious garage rock, with singer Danny Lee Blackwell’s crazed guitar cutting the air and bass player Tarek Wegner clambering atop some of the tables at the front (Wegner’s prone to crowd surfing in a more traditional venue). Yes, they rocked most mightily.

Two people manipulating their laptops isn’t always a recipe for riveting live showmanship, but then again, Cloudland Canyon aren’t about flash. They just generate a lush wall of sound that informs modern electronic music with enchanting and odd touches that render it quintessentially psychedelic. Some of the best visuals of Hypnotikon’s impressive light show–rolling landscapes projected updside-down and in negative over one another–bolstered the decidedly cinematic sound.

Hypnotikon’s most inspirational hour, not surprisingly, came from the one-man incarnation of psych vets Silver Apples. Bathed in the brightest orgy of colored lights and images to bombard Hypnotikon’s stage all weekend, keyboardist/singer Simeon played material that seamlessly spanned his entire career, delivering the songs in a frenetic but playful voice as his bank of keyboards and oscillators bleeped, throbbed, and sang. It didn’t just paint frescoes on spectators’ eardrums: Simeon’s music rang with impish charm and a sense of humor that made its septuagenarian creator seem younger than yesterday.

The Triple Door Takes an Epic Psychedelic Trip This Weekend

Midday Veil, one of several psych-rock acts expanding minds at the Triple Door this weekend. (Photo: Tony Kay)

Somewhere around the 1980s, when Baby Boomers began graying and the musical rebel cries of their youth settled into rose-tinted memory, the word psychedelic morphed from its original pharmaceutical context into quaint semaphore for anything with bright colors, or any band that exhibited even the faintest pinch of a ‘60s influence.

But psychedelic music’s about much more than meandering Granola blues riffs à la Canned Heat or The Grateful Dead, or a tie-dyed T-shirt. In the most ideal iteration of the term, psych-rock should be barrier-breaking, strange, exotic, outside-the-box, and informed by an altered state of being (and no, you don’t have to literally be on psychedelics to create or appreciate it).

Thank God there are a few bands out there looking to reclaim psychedelic music by doing their own thing. And this weekend, the Triple Door offers several hits of the best psych-rock out there with the Hypnotikon Seattle Psych Rock Fest.

Spurred by similar musical festivals in Austin and LA, Hypnotikon showcases nearly every bastard offspring of psychedelic music, from swoony shoegazer pop to the metronomic Cinemascope dissonance of krautrock. Both Friday and Saturday night feature local and national psych-rock acts, and at $25 per night (or $40 for both days), it’s a sensory feast at a reasonable price (check out the Triple Door website for all the deets). Here’s how the line-up for both nights stacks up.

Friday:

Fungal Abyss, Friday’s opening band, formed as a side project for Seattle prog-metal titans Lesbian, but FA’s grown into its own distinctive animal. Their long, often-improvised tracks unspool with a well-honed sense of sonic atmosphere and a backbeat that goes from jazzy to seismic in an instant.

Midday Veil, another Seattle-based project, provided Bumbershoot’s most headily-delicious hour this last Labor Day Weekend, and their Hypnotikon set will likely follow suit. Emily Pothast’s rich dark-chocolate chant of a voice gives the band’s wildly-experimental sonics (Indian Raga meets experimental electronic by way of Pink Floyd?) an exotic and mesmerizing center.

Bay area band Lumerians, by contrast, creates a dense, danceable drone that spikes traditional psychedelic rock tropes like trippy guitars and mind-expanding lyrics with stuttering percussion and fuzzed-out keyboards.

Chicago band Cave should make for a great capper to the evening: Sweaty rock energy runs roughshod alongside raga-like repetition, funk grooves, and caterwauling synths, and they’re reportedly as forceful as they are forward-thinking, live.

Saturday:

Seattle’s Jetman Jet Team open Day Two of Hypnotikon with a lovely, textbook example of psychedelia’s romantic kid sibling, shoegazer music. That translates to lush, tuneful, British-sounding pop songs wrapped in a blanket of symphonic guitar pings and whooshes. It’s a familiar formula that’s easy to take for granted, but Jetman do it to the swirly, fetching hilt.

Night Beats moved from Texas to Seattle a few years ago, chewing on the hallucinogenic roots of old-school psych-rock hellions like the 13th Floor Elevators the whole way. Like their psychedelic forebears, Night Beats play straight-ahead garage rock songs with the kind of ferocious live presentation that blows all notions of simple revivalism out of the water. If they’re not the most potently-rocking act all Hypnotikon, I’ll eat both of the hats I own.

Cloudland Canyon contrast Night Beats’ guitar-based sound with a heavily-synthesized style — monolithic, buzzing keyboards, walls of restless electronic percussion, and disembodied vocals that lend a trippy but distinctively human quality to the music.

It wouldn’t be a proper psych-rock fest, however, without at least one rediscovered act from psychedelia’s early days, and Hypnotikon closes out with a doozy.

New York duo Silver Apples began playing in the late 1960s, creating their own mini-universe of strange noises with vocalist/keyboardist Simeon’s handmade synthesizers and wraithlike voice, and Danny Taylor’s pulsing drums. The resulting sounds proved too damned weird even for the drug-fueled Sixties, but the metronomic drive and eccentricity of their catalog presaged current electronic dance music in a big way. Taylor passed away in 2005, so Simeon has carried on Silver Apples solo, partly utilizing the modern technology that his music helped shape in the first place. And hearing this 75-year-old guy creating alien sounds that still sound ahead of their time could turn out to be the most transcendent portion of the whole weekend.

Schoolyard’s Scrappy Cabaret Takes a Risk at Re-Bar

The Schoolyard's Cabaret (Photo: David Wulzen)

In Cabaret’s most recent appearance on Broadway the production’s lengthy run revived some of the glam from the days when its theatre was known as Studio 54. It was a very posh affair, very slick, very Broadway (even in its stripped-down appearance at the Tony Awards).

While the Broadway revival was easy on the eyes and ears, all the slickness was a little out of place for Weimar Berlin. The Schoolyard’s current production at Re-Bar (through May 12; tickets) overcomes that lack of historical continuity in a production born out of its environment. It’s a haute cuisine recipe, but with local, organic ingredients. It doesn’t always succeed in its risk-taking but let’s be grateful and enthusiastic for its willingness to try.

The Schoolyard's Cabaret (Photo: David Wulzen)

Schoolyard’s ensemble of beautiful performers do great work on all counts. Todd Hull and Monica Wulzen are standouts in the acting department, Hull as Herr Schultz, a mild-mannered Jewish grocer; and Wulzen as the club singer Sally Bowles.

Daniel Wood, as Ernst Ludwig, finds a bit of color in a role with a tenuous grip on its third dimension, but his grip on his accent is less sure. Gary Zinter’s Emcee was plagued with mic problems in an immensely challenging sound engineering environment. When his voice came through, however, the resonant, rasping baritone captivated.

This production’s biggest risk in its attempt to bring John Kander’s score into a KEXP world.

The score has been re-jiggered for a krautrock-inspired band in Kraftwerk uniforms and featuring a pair of synthesizers, a piano keyboard, drum kit, and guitar. It’s an uneasy mashup. Taking Kander’s Broadway interpolation of Weimar-era Kurt Weill and interpolating it far further afield results in diffusion and dissonance. When it works, as in most of the Emcee’s numbers and the early nightclub number “Don’t Tell Mama,” it clicks without inspiring.

Zinter’s achievement is that he dispenses with charm and smarm of most Emcees in favor of the disconnection (with a nod to Brecht) of an alt-pop star whose lips never appear from behind the microphone. The proof of the pudding is that Wulzen is less successful when she goes full-bore Patti Lupone in her final number.

Kander and Ebb created cool, affectless songs that serve as an antidote to the Broadway contrivances of overblown emotion. Ebb’s soft shoe lyrics and Kander’s breathless vamps balance musical theatre’s melodrama. Power chords give this production an unseemly touch of Andrew Lloyd Webber without the lyricism required of the old-fashioned romance at Cabaret’s center.

The roughness of the musical direction is also reflected in the costuming and some of the performances but these feel right at home here. Schoolyard is a scrappy theatre doing a story of battered people scraping along in a battered space still dedicated to making magic. Fraulein Schneider’s reference to economic hardship states the obvious. This production is on time and in the right venue. In the face of financial straits and rising xenophobic fascism we’d do well to revisit the Cabaret.