
Some of you might have not known I had an impromptu performance the other week ago along with one of my cohorts, Painted Cakes, at the new Forthrite Printing gallery that just opened nearby in Oakland. It was one of my first shows since completing Source Domain and I was quite pleased with how it went. Well it turns out the show was reviewed by Shumit DasGupta, a freelance writer for Stereo Subversion, and he gave us quite a glowing review of our show!
Here’s an excerpt:
What sets these musicians aside from all of this is an approach I couldn’t conceive of before I watched them do their thing. Not only did they employ live musicians - on this night a bassist by the perhaps self-aggrandizing tag of Super Das G - but took their samples from the fertile grounds of the East Bay neo-jazz scene. That is to say, all of their clips were recorded directly, live, and unadulterated from real musicians, really close. Monstrous polyrhythms, textured chunks of double bass strokes, delicate strains of counterpoint melodies like air-whipped frosting through the nozzle of the noble violin - all of these harvested on local soil.
Master chefs make cooking look like a well-earned joy, and these DJs (and that is far too antiquated a term to describe them, but vocabulary is slow to keep pace with innovation) are no exception. They bring to the table prepared cuts, beats and riffs they’ve constructed beforehand, and liberally fuse them with both elements of improvisation and craft. At multiple points throughout the evening I watched them pass the buck from set to set, with no other obvious lead to each other but a two syllable vocal cue as to what time signature they were cooking in.
From: Stereo Subversion/Concert Reviews/Painted Cakes & Stevedood
Thanks for the review Shumit!
Stereo Subversion