Events
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Dan Deacon
@ the El Rey Theater – Los Anegeles, CA 01/15/08
By Joey Coombe
Photos by Red Slurpee
The L.A. stop of Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche’s Ultimate Reality Tour took up residence at the El Rey Theater. The slick and swanky club furnished with crystal cat chandeliers, red carpet floors, bathroom attendants and aisle-clearing ushers was no match for Deacon’s hipster brand of partyfuntime music. Deacon and company soon overturned the atmosphere of the club like party crashers filling that living room your parents keep nice for entertaining guests.
L.A.’s own Abe Vigoda opened the show. A bouncy, quirky punk band, Abe Vigoda sounded bright despite having a denseness, depth and gloominess of bands like The Walkmen and Joy Division. Between songs, guitar player Juan Velazquez announced “Attention K-Mart shoppers, we have a 7” on sale in the back.” As an opener, Abe Vigoda kept their set short, but reserving ample time for between song chatter. Their lax attitude contested the El Rey’s velvet curtains; still, their set was pretty great. Sounding much like a west coast version of Philadelphia’s The Spinto Band, Abe Vigoda was sporadic and spastic, but not ridiculous; punky and energetic, but not annoyingly cute.
Some refer to them as Tropical Punk: a sort of horse latitudes version of art damaged rock. But maybe the adjective tropical might imply attitude or approach rather than sound; either way the band’s set was hot.
Health, another L.A. band followed Abe Vigoda. Health was loud and noisy, almost tribal and very rhythmic. The band members thrashed around on stage like they had angry kittens in their pants – because full grown cats would not fit in jeans so tight. Their music is abrasive without being aggressive.
As Health finished their set, crewmembers set up the stage for the main attraction, Jimmy Joe Roche and Dan Deacon’s collaborative video and sound project, Ultimate Reality. In addition to Deacon’s twisting of knobs and punching of keys into musical noises, the video was accompanied by two very skilled live drummers. During the video, their silhouette’s projected black against the bottom of the screen very ominously. This was a stark contrast to Roche’s bright neon visuals, dense, layered imagery, and kaleidoscopic mirroring that presented these recycled action film scenes as fresh and new.
In Ultimate Reality, Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche present a story for our time using scenes and images from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. The loosely structured tale of a robot sent back in time to rescue a pregnant Schwarzenegger from an evil robot comes across as a metanarrative, transposing the two opposite ends of Schwarzenegger’s film career as correlative: the early uber-masculine action hero, shifts to the more feminized version of masculinity he plays in Junior, Kindergarten Cop, and Twins. It is as if this amalgamation of Schwarzenegger scenes was the film he had been intending to make all along. And in a way that is true.
As a metanarrative, Ultimate Reality is a comment on our culture and how certain movies, in the words of The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, “get scratched into our souls.” The film begins with text scrolling on a bright red background, a narrator emerges to microphone the words to the crowd, the setting of scene is not just an allusion to Star Wars, but to epic-ness. Twice more the action stops to reorient the viewer into the context of the video. But it is unnecessary, this is a story that doesn’t need to be explained but only experienced. The text just works to excite the viewer by repeating the shit she already knows, reiterating and rehashing bits and pieces from not just Schwarzenegger films but other 80s sci-fi and action films.
I had first read about Ultimate Reality in William Bowers Pitchfork column “Puritan Blister #31.” Bowers article on the project and concept was strange and alluring, almost indescribable. In Bowers review, I couldn’t quite get a handle on what exactly Roche and Deacon were doing/have done with Ultimate Reality, but standing in the middle of the El Rey Theater, having bright hot neon shining on my face, Deacon’s sonic sound textures blaring in my ears, Ultimate Reality made perfect sense, because in a way, it’s title was completely fitting.
There are glimpses of familiarity in Ultimate Reality; one gets a sense of what’s being used and how it’s being played with, but for the most part, it’s a completely unique experience. It’s hard to follow if one is set on forming a structure and plot from the images, but if one enjoys the images for what they are and how the sound works to enhance what’s on the screen as well as the complete ambitiousness of the project, then Ultimate Reality may be the Dark Side of the Moon /Wizard Of Oz mash-up for the indie camp.
The night however did not end with Ultimate Reality, afterward Deacon played a set from the floor of the El Rey. It was a bit grueling , sort of like hipster summer camp as Deacon worked the crowd in a participatory yet polite frenzy, barking orders like a camp counselor. This seemed enjoyable mostly for those in the immediate vicinity of Deacon. Deacon and those choosing to participate in Deacon’s guidelines, dance suggestions and rules of conduct could only be observed from the sidelines. The El Rey’s own rules about keeping aisles clear as if there were rows of seating, box and orchestra, presented an imaginary line splitting the audience. Still, Deacon’s songs held up to the sounds from his most recent record, Spiderman of the Rings. Deacon weaves sonic textures that build and explode, somehow incorporating the best parts of other songs never written into a cohesive whole. Songs like “The Crystal Cat” and “Okie Dokie,” flourished in the live setting responding to the energy of the audience while others like “Wham City” benefited from the lack of track listing separating tracks to make some feel longer than others. It was a performance of democratic intensity.
Overall, the night was a good time. Two solid openers actually prepared the audience for the headliner rather than totally destroying the momentum. And Deacon’s decision to play a set after Roche’s video rather than before was both crucial and trivial. The music made by Dan Deacon draws a lot on childhood nostalgia, but incorporates it into a larger context. Spiderman of the Rings is able to make musical fragments sound larger, broader, epic. Similarly, Roche and Deacon’s Ultimate Reality display that ability on a larger level. Ultimate Reality must be experienced.
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