A Night With Armor
André Obin celebrates the vinyl release of his album at Deep Cuts on Friday, 27 December 2024.
Sean Drinkwater and Telelectrix open the triplestack bill.
Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️ Hump Nights 〰️
Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights 〰️ Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️
Telelectrix
A poppy electric duo, with a kind of Blondie-esque lead vocal and, opposite her, a synth maestro lording over four banks of keys, which he devoted to a handful of wild solo breaks. Telelectrix played a mix of originals and covers, including No Doubt’s “It’s My Life.”
There are two countervailing tendencies in electronic music.
The first tendency is merely luxuriating in the pure exoticism of electronically synthesized sounds. This tendency is for the true electronica heads and it came first, chronologically, in the history of electronic music because before anyone understood how to turn these sounds into music, they contented themselves with the joy of exploring the seemingly infinite combination of tones, timbres, and pitches producible via synthetic means. It’s the same kind of joy you feel when you prod an instrument, which you don’t know how to play, and a sound comes out. It’s fun! But you still don’t know how to play music, and nobody would confuse the noise you made with music.
The second tendency is a kind of limiting dynamic in which the absolute freedom of electronically synthesized sound is pulled back from its farflung alien habitats into a realm that is more hospitable to conventional and broad-based human enjoyment. That realm, typically, is pop music, and especially pop music that extends into the dancehall dimension. It’s not so much the exoticism of the sound that matters, as the ability to sustain that sound effortlessly with the press of a few buttons while an ecstatic crowd exhausts itself in the pit.
Telelectrix (whose name looks like it could use one more, or one less, ‘el,’ like Teleleleletrix) split the difference between the two tendencies, with straightforward electropop numbers that occasionally floated off into the aethereal heights of pure synth solos. Because you just gotta, the real ones know.
Sean Drinkwater
Three, four, five, six performers on stage. The dancey electro ensemble Sean Drinkwater shuffled different characters in and out of the lineup, weaved in cameos, and played musical chairs with the instrumentation throughout the set. Which included a bigger storytelling element, courtesy of the charismatic frontman, than you usually get out of outfits that plant their flags in dark and somewhat late night clubs. Straight outta Somerville, with shades of a less morose Depeche Mode.
André Obin
Headliner André Obin celebrated the vinyl release of his latest LP Armored King. Which is a title that flashes a kind of dystopian imagery appropriate for our politically and socially retrograde moment in time. Internal politics aside, doesn’t it seem like electronic music cozies up next to totalitarian aesthetics a little too often. I mean, who knows how they actually think or vote, but those Daft Punk guys were always dressed like stormtroopers.
Obin performed solo, trading between banks of keys and a guitar, employing samplers and various FX apparatus to multiply and deepen his sound. The setlist, like the album, cuts effortlessly across various clubby genres, from rock, pop, dance, techno, a little industrial here and there. More impressive than being able to pen a composition in this or that genre is demonstrating the deft skill to weave them together into a single piece, and not make it sound weird in a bad way.
Instead, it sounded weird in a good way. That’s all you want from electronic music.
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André Obin celebrates a vinyl release at Deep Cuts.