The
musicians of the Sacramento Electronica Music Festival get together for
a little photo op. Top row, left to right: Dain Fitzgerald
(Mupetblast), Wes Steed (Lifeliner/Park Avenue Music/Hearts+Horses),
Michael Calero (Vacant Persons), Sean Bivins (Vacant Persons), Cole
Cuchna (the New Humans), Robbie LaCasse (the New Humans), Bishop (the
MoookieDJ). Bottom row, left to right: Scott Simpson (the New Humans),
Ryan Lindow (CityState), Dan Osterhoff (DJ Whores), Trevor Lyon
(Thriftcar), Anand Parmar (Crush Delight), Mike Steez (the New Humans),
Dana Gumbiner (Night Night). PHOTO BY WES DAVIS |
The
Sacramento Electronica Music Festival is this Thursday through
Saturday, January 28-31, doors at 8 p.m.; at TownHouse Lounge, 1517
21st Street; $5 for a single ticket, $10 for a three-day pass; find out
more and purchase tickets at http://sacelectronicafest.tumblr.com.
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It’s 10 years into the new millennium, and people still don’t
know anything about electronica music. This weekend, though, will be a
chance to enroll in a crash course: The first ever Sacramento
Electronica Music Festival in Midtown.
I’m not sure whether most folks, including myself and many of the
performers, have any idea what to expect, but I’m going to use these
subsequent 1,000 words to both educate and also prime the pump for
three days of fork-lift-in-reverse, bleep-and-blip orchestrations
emanating from oblong metal boxes manned by a bunch of dudes in tight
leather jackets who twist knobs and sing about post-revolution neon
La-Z-Boy people movers.
OK, now, that’s an unfair stereotype. Most electronica doesn’t have vocals, for starters.
Anyway, one of the first signs that tipped me off to the fact that
the broader Sacramento population has little clue about electronica was
a recent throwaway blurb in our fair city’s daily paper. In the story,
one of the festival’s top acts, Sister Crayon—a trip-hop influenced
four-piece with kite-high vocals, robust bass bumps and wandering
synths—was called out as having a “low-fi” sound.
Really? Let’s set the record straight: Sister Crayon may be dark,
possibly brooding—even spiritual, if that’s your game. But the band is
anything but “low-fi.”
So goes the argument: Put a few guitars, drums and a singer on a
stage, and people can figure it out. It’s rock. It’s indie. It’s
nu-glam art pop with a post-punk tendency. Whatever. Add some drum
machines, samplers, a laptop, perhaps a Moog or otherwise unidentified
fucking object, and viewers, listeners, even critics are confused.
(For the record, I confess to my own lack of knowledge. I once saw
local dub-pop trio Chllngr at The Press Club and didn’t even realize
Dan Osterhoff—recently featured in this paper’s Music section as DJ
Whores—was actually deejaying with Chllngr’s other members,
Steven Borth and Young Aundee. I thought he was just standing around
behind a turntable downloading torrents or something.)
So, yeah, even I am not immune to the “WTF is electronica?” bug.
Local electronica producers speak of their glitchy breaks and wobbly
bumps, and I feel the urge to use Purell. I don’t know the jargon. But
I’m learning.
For example, even though Sister Crayon will play the Electronica
Music Festival—along with 26 other local and regional acts, including
former 916er Tycho, San Francisco’s Mochipet and Sacramento’s Dusty
Brown, Shaun Slaughter and the New Humans—I know that, in fact, Sister
Crayon isn’t really electronica.
It’s true. I even called Sister Crayon’s lead vocalist, Terra Lopez, to clarify this snafu once and for all.
“Ms. Lopez, we know your band surely isn’t low-fi. But is Sister Crayon actually electronica?”
Paper
Pistols is drummer-producer Ira Skinner. Here he is pounding the skins
to preprogrammed beats at Beatnik Studios. PHOTO BY WES DAVIS |
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“Not really,” Lopez replies, gamely, via phone last week. “I mean,
it’s kind of hard, because we use some electronic instruments,” like
the Akai MPC1000, a machine that makes drum sounds with your
fingertips, she says. So, OK, the band isn’t really electronica, but they love electronica. Doesn’t that count for something?
“We love Tycho, too,” Lopez adds. “Everyone in the band is ecstatic
about him.” All right, that’s cool, they’re in for the festival.
And maybe this is what makes the Sacramento Electronica Music
Festival so promising: It runs the gamut, tapping into some 20 years of
local music, highlighting electronica in its various forms: solo
producers. Deejays. Bands that incorporate electronic sounds. Bands
with electronica producers as members. Artists who hit play then
meander over to the bar for 30 minutes of drinks and jaw.
Back in the day, it wasn’t so easy. The electronica scene was just a
bunch of guys with a shitload of gear hanging around in coffeehouses
and warehouses.
Evan Schneider, who’s been producing electronica music since the
mid-’90s under the moniker Tha Fruitbat, witnessed firsthand this
evolution. The first show he remembers playing was in 1997 at a
coffeehouse-cum-24-hour-computer-gaming den in Citrus Heights. He
performed with Dusty Brown, and he and Dusty were the outsiders. “The
whole music scene back then was definitely about deejays,” says
Schneider, who was a producer toting samplers and drum machines and a
boatload of other gadgets.
In time, technology improved, and life became easier for electronica
artists. Schneider remembers that Dusty started using a computer. “He
kind of blew everybody’s mind in the early years. And he taught
everybody how to make music [with a computer],” he recalls.
Later, Schneider and Dusty, along with Tycho, Park Avenue Music and
Chachi Jones, formed Command Collective, a quote-unquote electronica
“troupe” that’d play local coffeehouses, like the former Espresso Metro
on 12th Street downtown, along with DJ Mupetblast.
All of these guys will play the Electronica Festival, sans Chachi,
and all are unequivocally electronica. Others—the New Humans, various
deejays—not so much. But still welcome.
“More people are opening up to [electronic music],” Schneider
observes. “Sooner or later, every other band is going to have a laptop
guy.”
Today, the more popular electronica genres are dubstep, electro,
breakbeat, house, drum ’n’ bass and glitch. What the hell does all this
mean?
Well, here’s the part of the story where all the musicians sigh:
Dubstep is uptempo, bass-heavy, shuffled dance music. Electro usually
has a dominant kick drum and a mod-funk dance style. Breakbeat is
similar to electro though more organic, but still syncopated and
offbeat. House is dance, but more straightforward and with a
traditional time signature. Drum ’n’ bass is old-school,
superfast-tempo dance featuring, duh, bass and drums. Glitch splices
together samples of music to create beats. All of these genres are
subclassified under IDM, or intelligent dance music.
Traditionally, the electronica artist “peforms” behind a table
adorned with his or her cherished gadgets, nodding approval as the
beats dump thick through hopefully awesome speakers as the audience
jives accordingly. Traditional rock critics oftentimes pan electronica
sets for their ostensible insouciance—just a dude behind a computer
pumping his arms—but don’t let this cynicism discourage. It’s about the
power of the beats, which takes a thoughtfulness and focus on the part
of the beat maker.
It’s your job to suck it in—what with its high-fi glory—for they are the teachers, young grasshoppers.