It's fair to say that Meat Beat Manifesto's latest tour with Dälek sets
a new standard for electronic music performance. In Meat Beat's case,
the show reasserts just what a pioneer Jack Dangers has been in his
field through two of the most entertaining and idea-rich hours of live
music that I've ever seen. Meat Beat takes the art of live sound and
visual collage and elevates it to a level that others are going to be
reaching for for years.
I wouldn't have picked the velvety lounge atmosphere of Smith's Olde
Bar for a Meat Beat and Dälek show, but none of that mattered as soon
as the curtains pulled back and the music started. Dälek is always
impressive and brutal live, conjuring more menace than an entire metal
festival with just a couple of laptops and a microphone. Unfortunately,
the sound engineer at Smith's seemed to want to take his hate for music
out on the opening act and as a result, Dälek's usually pummelling,
bowel-loosening sound was pulled back to a more polite level.
Regardless, the power of Dälek's energy is the group's ability to cut
through technical drawbacks and hit audiences in the chest, and their
set of cuts exclusively from their last full length, Absence did just that.
I'd been primed that what Meat Beat Manifesto was doing on this tour
was amazing, but even armed with that knowledge, it would have been
impossible for anyone to overstate what this latest incarnation of the
Meat Beat live experience accomplishes. I had heard all about the live
video sampling and the synchronization of visuals and music and I
thought that I was ready for that, but when the show began to unfold,
the whole night took on the strange aura of the wizard pulling back the
curtain on music that I thought I already knew all there was to know
about. It wasn't just fun to see where samples came from--every Meat
Beat show I've been to since I was 15 has been great fun. But here,
once the initial joy of seeing a clip of Electro adressing an audience
wore off, I realized that the whole show was manufactured in such a way
as to provide a look inside the mind that makes Meat Beat Manifesto
work. This wasn't just a concert--it was an examination and display of
the creative process behind what is without a doubt some of the most
innovative and thoughtful sample-based music ever made. It was at once
a concert and a meta-concert, something that had to keep the heads of
those who were elevated by chemicals spinning for hours.
Jack Dangers' work as Meat Beat Manifesto is almost universally
acclaimed for its groove, its beats, its bass, and its dance appeal,
but his technique of fusing sound design with cut ups and postmodern
composition tends to get less attention. I've always known he was a fan
of John Cage, and that he put out records here and there that took his
sound design and music concrete interests to the fore, and I'd always
noticed the hundreds of samples that make up a Meat Beat record,
whether I could spot their origins or not. But what I'd never known was
that even sounds that don't call themselves out as samples, are
samples, and they are things that I've taken for granted for years.
There's a generation of kids out there who have grown up listening to
music laced with movie samples. They are the one's who have kept the
sci-fi sections of their local video rental houses in business by
trolling for "cool" sounds and mysterious bits of dialogue to inject
into cyberpunk disco operas ad nauseam. But who has ever sat down with
a spaghetti western, and noticed someone playing a harmonica and
thought 'that would make a great hook for a dubbed-out breakbeat
track?' Jack Dangers, apparently.
And that was what was so amazing to watch and hear. Those songs I've
loved and danced to for years are built up from so many bits of aural
detritus and sounds that no one else would notice or even think to
steal that watching the show once didn't even seem like enough. The
wizard had pulled back the curtain and I began to understand what was
going on behind the scenes, but I still can't comprehend it. Dangers
takes something so seemingly mundane as a man standing by a window in a
documentary saying 'one day I woke up in Miami' and he makes it the
hook in a song that an audience full of people can shout like it was a
song lyric at a Morrissey show. How does that even work? Mariah Carey
becomes a siren drone, men falling off of buildings become the source
of a scratch, and more pieces of songs and movies than I will ever
remember converge to become something altogether new, bigger, and even
more meanignful. That level of taking a sound byte and giving it a
completely new meaning in a completely new context while still
keeping the party going, and then whipping the audience in the eyeballs
with the sound's visual accompaniment is something that I'd never seen
before, and I don't know that anyone else could even pull it off.
It's hard to want to be too analytical about music that's so
infectiously funky that it gets even the stiffest chin strokers
bouncing. Meat Beat's latest effort on stage might be the only example
I can think of that wouldn't be at all out of place in an academic
lecture about sampling culture and the possibilities that are opened up
by the streams of digital media in a postmodern world. Well, it would
be out of place simply by the fact that Dangers is able to do all of
those things that the scholars cream themsleves over while still
pumping out the most banging beats anywhere. I mean, it's almost not
even fair!
This latest tour is one for the fans, full of great old tracks (and a
few new) that fans will know and love. It's also for the trainspotters,
the gear heads, the new media fetishists, the performance artists, the
video editors, the viral video scroungers, and the digital art
professors who like to talk about the kinds of things that Jack and
company are doing but rarely ever manage that kind of energy in a
lecture hall. It's a show that can be enjoyed as candy for the eyes and
ears just as easily as food for the brain, and that's exceedingly rare.
I thought I knew what Meat Beat Manifesto was all about, and to an
extent, I was on the right track, but this show has taken my
appreciation of Dangers' career to a whole new level.
 |
|
