Courtesy of Paul Demix
After a break due to the loss of its previous venue and to let its curator/promoter decompress, the Milwaukee Electronic & Experimental Music series—MELT for short— re-launched Friday night at the Cactus Club with little fanfare but plenty of sonic diversity. The Cactus Club may lack the chairs and tables of MELT’s previous home, Stonefly Brewing Company, but standing, however, produced dancing, even if what got the crowd moving most may not have been what veteran clubgoers might have expected.
Stratus, a fresh-faced newcomer to MELT, conjured from his computer sounds relying in good part on the organic sounds of chimes, celesta and other euphonious tones swathed in filtration that roughed up their mellifluous qualities. "Conjure" aptly describes his look of a mad scientist hunched over his illumined laptop as melodies and beats rife with purposefully disorienting glitches emanated from his laptop. His countenance beamed into its widest smile, however, toward the end of his opening set as his rhythms approached the bass-driven regularity of house music, albeit one of its more mutated strains.
Contrasting with Stratus’s glee at his own sonic creations, Night Hunter maintained a nearly wholly blank stoicism behind his screen perched at such an angle to allow him to stand fully upright. Some of that may have been born from some nervousness, as he would admit when his set fell short of his allotted time by several minutes, and he asked his audience what route he should take to fill his time. His apparent emotional void and woolen cap and leather jacket ensemble gave the Hunter the appearance of an especially focused truck driver, all the more so when he would place a CB radio-looking mouthpiece up to his face to accompany his sometimes keening, at other times metalically heavy creations with seemingly growled, unintelligible processed vocals. If nerves got the better of him, the condition didn't adversely affect the bludgeoning artistry of his sound, which did inspire a couple or three to bust some tentative moves to occasional passages of regular tempo.
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The Demix may be too visually riveting a performer to warrant much in the way of dancing, but that's no dismissal of what he throws down. The man responsible for organizing and promoting so much of the city's electronic musical talent on MELT bills over the last several years delivered a set high in ferocity. Thick sheets of feedback and longer manipulated stretches shared space with the faintest, nearly suffocated shards of melody and harmony in a breakneck assault on his minimal equipment. If ever a man and machinery gave the appearance of volleying a spirit back and forth between each other in bouts of possession and exorcism, The Demix has mastered that rarefied scenario.
By the time adoptahighway hit the platform, the audience had thickened considerably, likely especially for him. Some of his tonalities and textures hewed closely to those of The Demix who preceded him, while others belied his classical training and seeming affection for ’70s and ’80s synth masters including Mike Oldfield and Depeche Mode. But the man christened Barry Paul Clark has plenty else to commend his aural assaults, too. For instance, he employs occasional lyrics in cogent English, as evidenced his masterfully dolorous full-length debut album released last month, A Fault, which he more or less gave its premiere here. Even then, being the creatively fidgety sort he is, at least some of what could be heard from his long-player sounded rearranged. Samples from other vocal sources fit the despairing mode of his recent originals as well. Conversely, Clark adopts a chipper persona as a promoter of his own music and MELT, citing his personal honor in being included in the concert series on several occasions and the importance of the ongoing event in highlighting local music. Alas, the first showing of a new adoptahighway music video promised on MELT's Facebook page didn't occur, but Clark compensated duly with his oddly accessible music and personal flair.
Though some attendees split the club's confines upon adoptahighway's departure, many of those who stayed finally got into some serious dancing. They could thank screwy duo ZeroBeat for that. The facially hirsute twosome set off a flurry of motion with their combination of electric guitar and vocals run through digitized distortions and dexterous drum wizardry that could give Neil Peart a run for his money, were the Rush percussionist seriously into drum ’n’ bass and free jazz arrhythmia much as he is having set a standard for prog metal skin pounding. Some were gently slam dancing, while others were inspired to herky-jerky bodily machinations that aptly mimicked ZeroBeat's angularities. Whether songs about mind control, technological dystopia and, reflective of Frank Zappa at his most juvenile, masturbation moved those assembled all the more to show their appreciation in movement, it's tough to gauge. Their enthusiasm sufficient to call for an encore did seem to catch the Beat'ers off guard, though they summoned up one more dose of spazzy artiness as the clock struck 1 a.m.
As The Demix remains invigorated to keep the party going and the city keeps producing imaginative synthetic music, MELT should be set to continue for a good long while.
