From nils Sent Wed, Apr 21st 1999, 00:38
From nils Sent Wed, Apr 21st 1999, 00:38
> In Detroit, the ads for Friday's show (doors at 9PM) list Trans Am at the > top and Pan sonic underneath (along with "Laddio Balacko Plus DJ On"). > Anyone know what or who Laddio Balacko is? I get the feeling that I should > be very, very afraid... In Boston (earlier tonite) the order was LB then PS then TA. Interesting audience. A lot of young hipsters. Pretensious arty types. Extremely loud show. With earplugs I almost went deaf. Side benefit: some nice body vibrations, esp. with PS. At times I felt my colon moving in new and distinctive ways. They did a good job with the sound, though. You could get a hint of what was happening in the treble without too much painful screeching. My first exposure to LB. Bass and drums are everything with this band. They played some drones/noise with guitars and saxophone, but the meat of it was in the bass player and drummer having nice funky interchanges. In the rhythm section the music was improv heavy. The noise/drones on top were quite repetitive. In general: relentless, harsh, throbbing. Interesting but I don't think I'd want to listen to this band regularly. PS a bit disappointing. Seemed caught between their newer 4-on-the-floor techno beats and their older super-sparse click-and-whir abstraction. They mostly set up loops with their weird analog tone generators, about 8 bars long, then added on other loops to achieve polyrhythm and texture. Heavy use of delay. A lot of 4/4 and some 8/8 and some nice expansion to 9 and 11 later on. There were some nice transitions between pieces, surprises galore there. But otherwise lots of loops, I was hoping for more free-form playing. TA took forever to set up. I don't think they made it for the pre-show soundcheck. So I had to leave. Their lengthy soundcheck was pissing me off and things were dragging on.