February 10, 2006 – The Knitting Factory, Los Angeles, Ca

    Friday night started off with the powerhouse hip hop duo called Dälek (pronounced dialect).  Having attended many of their shows before, and destroyed my ears in the process, I was ready with dorky earplugs in hand.  Dälek is one of those bands who are always ready to envelope the audience in a relentless barrage of heavy beats, and raucous noise, beautifully attached to haunting melodies.  Dälek accompanies the sound with his angry prose, which challenges societal hypocrisy in religion, politics, the class system, and hip hop, among other things.  With Oktopus in the back, managing the beats while gesturing emphatically to the music, and Dälek confronting you up front at the mic, their set is always sure to overwhelm.  Towards the end, there was a short interlude where Dälek repeated ‘Watch my culture bleed, watch my culture die, from their ashes we shall arise’ before inundating the place again with heavy sound and dark energy…. This just gives you a taste of what their show is like. 
Up next was Meat Beat Manifesto, three guys on a laptop and a live drummer.  Let me digress before I recount the awesomeness that was this show.  The advent of the laptop to live music performance has brought about new modes of musical performance due to the generally boring quality to going on stage with only a laptop.  While flashy visuals have always been a part of live musical performance, they became essential to many artists who created most of their music electronically, an act which requires little more than a click or enter to share with the public.  Meat Beat Manifesto means to be at the cutting edge of new developments in live performance.  For this tour, they are using software tailored specifically for them by a friend which allows them to mix and sample actual visual audio images just as a turntablist mixes and samples bits and pieces off of vinyl records. 
    While I am not familiar with MBM’s work, so I can’t give you specific song names or anything, I can say that their music is techno based, going from more drum ‘n bass inspired songs, to vocal laden ones sounding Primal Scream-ish, to more house-like numbers.  Of course, there is a lot of dynamic improvisation going on in both sight and sound due to their bad-ass software performance system.  As the bass and the beats rocked you through the floorboards, the visuals allowed for a symbiotic aural and visual experience, maintaining a momentum between eye and ear.  Their set started off with visual samples from the seventies that reminded me more of what I would expect from the band Man or Astroman?.  Visuals and audio sampled and scratched included the ‘oompa loompa calling’ flute from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Hellraiser, rappers, politicians, and –my personal favorite- a ‘scratching’ head explosion, all intermingled with their heavy break beats and groovy sound.  At one point, the jump from right screen to left screen between images was coupled with an accompanying jump from left to right speaker that was just really cool.  The end of their set had some Chemical Brothers samples, along with a house song whose refrain “It’s in my brain” was coupled with scratching the sight and sound of Alex screaming while being forced to watch violent images in The Clockwork Orange.  The encore also included a play between the drum samples (again, visual and aural combined) and MBM’s live drummer, which I really enjoyed.  My description really only touches the surface of how dynamic and ground-breaking Meat Beat Manifesto are as a band.  Their show was an overwhelming experience that should not be missed the next time they come around. 

-Taina Guarda