cooltunes

I attended the opening performance for the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival on Wednesday night. The event had additional sigificance outside of being the opening night of the festival - it was also the first time the festival had booked a night of only Mexican artists to perform.

The Mexicans in question, .pig and Murcof, put on an excellent show, although they weren’t as good as I was expecting.

.pig’s performance was a piece entitled “feto talk”, which consists of massively filtered and distorted turntable scratches and vocal effects. Speaking objectively, I don’t think I’d ever listen to them on my own time but as a performance they were impressive. The music was very harsh, very static-y and dissonant, so I was a little relieved when they finished after about half an hour. I think that’s probably all I could’ve put up with before getting irritated or bored.

Murcof is one of my favorite musicians of all time and I had extremely high expectations for his live performance. He has a new album coming out on September 17th, Cosmos, so I was looking forward to hearing some new material, and he did not dissapoint in that aspect. He played four new tracks from the album, ranging from one I’d heard from his myspace page, Cielo, to a couple of extremely drone-y ambient pieces that were new to me.

All of the songs were great and I’m eagerly anticipating the new album, although I’m a little surprised by the direction his music seems to have taken. The two drone-y pieces were a surprise, as most of his music seems to incorporate a fair amount of IDM-like percussion. Picture Tim Hecker-style ambient, except built from the classical sample-based palette that Murcof uses, and you’ll have something pretty close to what I heard Wednesday.

Anyway, the music was good but the performance itself left a little something to be desired - Murcof basically sat in front of his laptop and didn’t move for most of the show, except to tweak knobs on a mixer and a MIDI controller. I’m used to at least video being projected when I see electronic music acts, and its absence at this show reminded me of why it’s usually necessary with laptop-based musicians.

Most laptop artists are god damned boring to watch live.

Also, Murcof only performed four songs. The show didn’t start until 9:00 and I was out of the theatre by 10:30. What the hell.

I had tickets to the next night’s show, which Tim Hecker was performing at, but honestly, I didn’t think it was worth the effort to Bart it to the Mission, then walk to the train station and get home at 1 AM just to see him play a half-hour set.

Even if the festival has good performers next year, I’m not sure I would consider going if the format is the same. I’d much rather go to something like the upcoming Biosphere show at the Recombinant Media Labs Compound.