Chimerical reactions

>>The Turbo Crunk posse—Megasoid,
Mofomatronix, Blingmod and Lunice—
ditch the DJs to play Frankenstein
with their future funk, live

NETWORK OF FOOLS: The Turbo Crunk crew

By ERIN MACLEOD

“It all started on MySpace,” begins Lunice, before he, Blingmod and the boys of Mofomatronix and Megasoid all start laughing. He’s trying to tell me how he got involved with the folks who are all coming together to start Turbo Crunk, a new monthly where there’ll be no DJs, but plenty of dancing.

“It’s about having an arsenal of a cappellas hooked up in advance, that you can throw on at any time, synch up to a drum machine and synths or whatever, and mix it live,” explains Sixtoo, who, alongside Wolf Parade’s Hadji Bakara, forms Megasoid. “The mandate with the Turbo Crunk night is we are bringing out people who play live, not DJs.”

Blingmod, meanwhile, is taking the same idea and applying it to video. “I’ve built software that is totally integrated with the music, so I’m taking MIDI data from their machines and using that to synthesize video and animation.”

Megasoid and Mofomatronix had been mashing up and spitting out music at two different Zoobizarre club nights for the past while, taking folks like Blingmod and Lunice onboard, and inviting various folks as well as each other to play. Then they realized that it might be an idea to mash up the nights as well.

“I think it wasn’t that we were playing a lot of the same music, it was more like not playing a lot of the shit that was going on elsewhere—kind of carrying this Ghislain Poirier torch of eclectic dance music,” says Hovatron of the duo Mofomatronix (Robophonics is the other half). “It made sense.”

Fast rap/slow rave

But what is this music that they’re playing? Hovatron describes it as, “Very synth-based, club-friendly rap music at somewhat higher BPM.” Bakara of Megasoid, on the other hand, states, “I’d say that we’re slower. We’re taking techno music and bringing it down, as opposed to bringing rap music up. It’s kind of a halfway point between them both, but way more of a rap speed than techno.”

“But most of the stuff we are writing works at more than one tempo anyway,” says Sixtoo. “It’s taking all these influences and smashing them into one thing that isn’t really genre-specific, isn’t really community-specific. We’re appreciative of all the communities that are there, even if we’re not part of all of them. We’re trying to create something that’s in between soundclash riddims, electro and hip hop stuff, and smashing it all together.”

And it’s not just the music that’s all about all-in. “We’ve tried to build with everybody,” continues Sixtoo. “It’s way better to include people than to try to be the rogue unit that’s doing it. This isn’t a regional thing. This lines us up with what our friends in Frisco are doing, what our friends in L.A. are doing, Portland, Seattle, New York, Scotland. It’s not one thing in one city at one specific time. We’re not responsible for it.”

Rocking in reverse

As Lunice says, MySpace helps make those connections. “I was experimenting with a lot of different kinds of beats. I found Hudson Mohawke, I was like, wow, that’s insane. I check out his top friends, I see Rustie, I check Rustie and I find out that everybody is from frickin’ Scotland. And then Rustie put me on his top friends. Then Hovatron finds me and is, like, we’re from Montreal. So it went from MySpace to Glasgow, Scotland to, ‘What the fuck kind of beat are they doing, that’s insane!’ to seeing that we go to the same school to asking me if I could play with them at one of their shows.”

Lunice’s tale is pretty emblematic of how this genre and scene (that resists being both a discernible genre or a scene) works. “It’s the Internet,” explains Bakara. “National borders have been eliminated a long time ago because of the dissemination of information.”

“There are pockets of this music happening all over the place,” says Sixtoo. “The networkability is insane. It’s so fast that the minute one person does something, it’s being reverse engineered by somebody else. To me, it seems like the most conversational time in music.”

“We just sent a batch full of instrumentals to Glitch Mob in L.A., and they’ll turn that into something different. Before we even rock it, they’ll rock it,” explains Bakara.

“This is the kind of crew that I’ve always wanted to be in,” says Sixtoo, “a network of fools that are actually down, have been doing it for a minute and have worked their way into this thing. It’s not like luck. Nobody involved in this thing are biters. They are just kids who have grown up with this mentality.”

With Nosaj Thing, Machinedrum and Pursuit Grooves
at Coda on Saturday, Feb. 16, 10 p.m., $5
($10 after midnight)