Spaceland – Silverlake, CA
Live Review: 10/13/09
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It’s 8pm on a Tuesday, but if you live in Los Angeles, that doesn’t sentence you to a night on the couch with Seinfeld and a TV dinner. There’s plenty to do, you just have to go out and find it. At Spaceland, for instance, a small, hip venue in Silverlake, a crowd is forming at the base of the stage. The air is buzzing—literally, and if you look around you’ll notice why. Most members of the audience are equipped not only with 20 oz cans of PBR, but also with a musical instrument of some kind. That’s because they’ve come to see Dewanatron. And a Dewanatron show, after all, is not really a show. The word “show,” you see, implies passive audience engagement—watching, listening, that kind of thing. At a Dewanatron event, however, the audience will almost certainly participate in the performance, making the entire happening a collaborative, visceral experience. Hence: the instruments.

Tonight’s event is aptly named The Dewanatron Experiment, and it indeed becomes group effort, the result of which is at once cacophonous and infectious. Once on stage, the duo, cousins Leon and Brian Dewan, unveil their handmade electronic instrument, the Dual Primate Console, and encourage audience members to play along using their own instruments. The buzzing, beeping and chirping that ensues is at first abrasive and slightly confusing—I’m not sure how to contribute using the Tibetan bells I threw into my purse at the last minute. But it quickly becomes obvious that there are no rules here, that lack of constraint is in fact the only decree, so I shake my bells right along with everyone else and despite myself, I actually begin to enjoy it.

Though the array of musical gadgets in the audience is impressive—besides my bells there are harmonicas, kazoos, flutes, miniature harps and even a drum made out of a 5-gallon water jug and a ping-pong paddle—there is really nothing that can compare to the complexity and ingenuity of the Dual Primate Console. A bulky-yet-beautiful contraption consisting of four synthesizers and four generators along with myriad buttons, knobs and dials all housed in a lustrous wooden cabinet, the DPC looks like something that is from both the past and the future, and sounds like it too. Playing it involves dialing numbers into a voltage reservoir, which then controls up to four electronic counters to create rhythm; sounds can come from external or internal sources and are manipulated by oscillators and filters.

The Dewans play the DPC on stage surrounded by musical guests of all types—an electrical violinist, a drummer, a variety of vocalists and one particularly energetic addition, Tommy Jordan (formerly of the band Geggy Tah), who employs everything from a beer bottle to long plastic tubing and his own stomach to make music. The effect at times borders on discordant and avant-garde, and at others just seems like a good old-fashioned dance party. Either way, being a part of it feels like being a part of something bigger than a concert; it is at once an exploration of the art of sound, of the alliance between technology and the living world, and just maybe, the future of music

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To learn more, visit www.dewanatron.com

via Christine Spehar, 28 October 2009 9:27pm | 2 |