Why Draw in the Dark When You Could Draw in the Light?Tonight was a magical time with my friends YACHT and The Blow. They were opened by Birds Fly Out of Me, whose best moment was the astonishment that their bass player had at her own LAZER EFFECT PEDAL. Her face read: "What the fuck is this? This rules! Can we do this?" And they did, and it was nice. The second band that played was called Thunder Sundress and they were touring with the other two bands and they seemed like they were over with. They had nice harmonies and two or three good songs (but two or three unnervingly bad songs) but there were clearly some issues between members.
YACHT played next and his set went so well, Conner was asking me how I planned to do better live and I told him. Jona of the band YACHT had a lot of stage presence and his set was structured in such a way that sound was coming out of his computer and he had dancing and shouting synchronized really choreographed out with his computer and it was really effective. The early parts of the set concentrated on how the set was going to work, he said some introductory words into the microphone and the first song was kind of a speak-singy kind of piece and then some guitars came in and it was over and he said 'don't clap' because the next song was crazy NOISE and he said some things and then started dancing. Another song was an example of 'how people danced in 1993' and another song was a cover of "Lean on Me" which would have been better with more audience participation. It went well and his set was brief, he ended trying to dance through a line of people, but they couldn't manage.
Khaela, The Blow, was another entity entirely. And it wasn't just her, it was also Jona. He played the straight 'this is how I make the beats' kind of motion man in the background while Khaela just astonished us in the foreground. He would make motions in the background like 'this is when to clap and this is when to stop clapping' or 'pretend my hand is the relative pitch of these bass notes - up, up, up, way down' and she would be sing/shouting things into our face about the terrible/fun reality that we faced. "WHERE ARE ALL THE PEOPLE?" she shouted looking right into the audience, asking Ryan Rinker's famous/terrible question "What's going on tonight?" and having the whole audience yell at her our location. There was a song where the lyrics were something like 'all the boys want all the girls and some of the girls want the boys...' and went on talking about how girls provide warmth and boys might try to disrespect women, but it won't work on all women and it was so succinct and so well put and the audience was in total agreement.
Through YACHT and expecially The Blow, the audience danced like ravers in a madhouse. There was a point 3/4ths through YACHT where he did a skit about hacking into a Holy Grail website and getting God to put on a rave and he talked about how his only wish was for a rave and from that moment on it was. And that's why the magic, mostly, because we'd been told that wishes were coming true.
Somebody, either The Blow or YACHT made a comment that they almost didn't come to Santa Cruz, and then somebody in their touring group said 'no, we should go, kids'll come out'. And even though they told us of this exchange in a nice way, it came off awfully condescending - like 'that ol' two bit town won't have a stage or a projection screen for us, who knows if they'll even pay for our CDs with American dollars.' But we danced like maniacs, and that's the truth.
