Beats in empty space

By JACK OATMON

There’s an amazing bit of guilty pleasure that comes along with seeing one of your favourite bands play a horrendously undersold show. The reasons to feel bad for the band and promoters are pretty obvious, given that their primary concern is getting crowds of people into venues. There’s the initial awkward 10 minutes of doing financial calculations in your head out of grim curiosity, coupled with a bit of the old “hee-hee-hee.” Then you get a drink or two into yourself and realize that you’re going to be treated to a living-room performance with none of the usual jockeying for dancefloor space, waiting at the bar and so on. That can be a pretty nice thing once in a while. Especially when it’s a band like the Juan Maclean, whose esoteric array of dated analog equipment and engaging, energetic presence turn a local watering hole like Zoobizarre into a mad scientist’s laboratory. So that was the scene on Wednesday, Sept. 3. The two dozen people who showed up came to dance too, so there wasn’t any self-conscious gazing or mysterious no-fly zone in front of the stage.

MAD SCIENCE: Whang and Maclean

The reasons no one showed up are not really cryptic when you consider that it was the Wednesday after a long weekend of partying and cash-torching, the venue was changed to somewhere halfway across town at the last minute, and it was a band that’s obscure enough to begin with and haven’t been on the radar much for the past two years. But I’m not writing about this to explain why some shows are sparse. I’m mentioning it because it turned out to be the best live dance music I’ve seen all year. Except for two classic tracks, the whole set was new material, branching out from the ambient soundscapes and acid house of the first record into Chicago tracks, melodic duets and Detroit techno, all the while retaining the undeniably punk rock approach for which the Juan Maclean are known. John Maclean himself was trancelike, frantically whipping his pale arms at a Theremin one moment and punching creaky old synth keyboards the next. The drummer’s sticks were jittering at warp speed while he rocked back and forth. Nancy Whang’s lovely, perpetually interrogating voice lifted the whole musical contraption out of its technological confines and made it into a sort of chanting, tribal ritual.

All that to say, the show blew my mind and I can’t wait for the new album. Moreover, I wanted to bring up another DFA artist who will be gracing Zoobizarre, a location that numerous of the New York label’s finest have an astounding penchant for emptying. That’s Tim Sweeney, longtime producer of the best house music podcast ever, Beats in Space. He plays next week on Friday, Sept. 19. Let’s see if any of the young scene chasers manage to tear themselves away from the Sinden DJ set scheduled for Coda that same night, which is part of the club’s two-night blogland showcase, with the fabulous Feadz on the Saturday bill.

I also might as well take this moment to mention that if you haven’t had a listen to the new Chemical Brothers single, “Midnight Madness,” yet, hop to it. And also, just in case you didn’t hear it elsewhere, Talib Kweli is playing a free outdoor show this evening on Mackay by Concordia!

DO NOT VOTE REFORM! jack.oatmon@gmail.com