Table space is a rare commodity at Antler Antennas show. Thesix-piece Milwaukee electronic/funk/spazz-hop band travels with stacks ofkeyboards, sound boxes, laptops and electronic gear, more than they cancomfortably fit on the keyboard stands and folding tables they bring with them,so for their show Saturday night at the Sugar Maple, they’re trying somethingdifferent.
“Since we’re always running out of surface area at shows andalways end up having to pile our gear, for this show I got this promotional kioskfrom work and re-purposed it into this two-sided contraption that lets us stackour gear vertically,” says multi-instrumentalist Sean Behling. “We’re hoping itworks as sort of a focal point for the show, giving the audience something tolook at while we play. This show for us is kind of a special occasion. We don’talways bring out all our gear, but this show is going to be one of those wherewe’ll probably have a good two and a half hours of setup, likewise on the tear down.”
This March, the sextet released its first EP, Sidewalk Tectonics. Saturday’sshow will celebrate the band’s latest single, “Singular Irregular,” a shifty,spaced-out jam which the band has posted for free online along with eightremixes. The song suggests Anticon in itssynthesis of hip-hop and electronica, but its influences are too varied to makethat comparison completely clean, and like much of the band's oeuvre, a wiry, punk energy runs through the track.
“Our songs genre hop in ways, so I have a hard time describing our sound,” Behling says. “Alot of them are born out of playing around with keyboards and drum machines andcoming up with parts that we like, and them maybe deconstructing them using glitch plug-ins and seeing what happyaccidents we can find in the studio. It’s a really rewarding process for us,since it can take us in a million different directions, so it always feelsfresh and new. We’re all kind of nerds, so we like the technical aspects ofmaking records, doing sound designs and playing with synths and just seeingwhere it takes us.”
MP3: Antler Antennas - "Singular Irregular" (Original Mix)
