'Lectric Lover

It's been in the 80s. Usually it's nice to get lost when it's this warm. But it hasn't been. Long Beach/LA are not places to be lost, it's annoying. You know where you should go but because of traffic you can't make a turn and so on, anyway . . .

Last few days have been about getting home at 3am. Saturday night I went to see a midnight showing of Clockwork Orange at the Art Theatre. It was fun to see it on the big screen and to see people dressed up as Droogs.

Saturday I went to Hollywood to see Hunter Revenge after being so bummed out in the summer when I was at Warped Tour and could not figure out what stage and what time he was playing . . . The show was at Cinespace. First off the show was late, 10:30pm till 2am. And let me tell you, Hollywood at 2am is not pleasant. Deserted. Only homeless people and hookers and a few clubbers. Random security guards. The only places open are hot dog stands and tattoo/bong shops (now I have no idea who the hell would want to mix those two things . . .). Anyway, Cinespace is a pretty cool club. It was like three or more clubs at once, and I think they might have a restaurant and an art gallery there too. To get to the stage you have to go through all these bars that have back doors that lead to more bars. I think there were only two of them, but it felt like a lot more. Each room had it's own DJ playing songs and then each DJ had a different kind of projection on the walls, like old 16mm films overlapping each other and so on. The stage also had videos projecting onto the bands. And I thought the combination of bands was great, everyone was a different style of music.

(FYI: the photos are shitty quality because it was really dark in there, so I had to use high ISO and slow shutter speed)

The first band was this 80s style retro heavy metal band, Sorcerer. And not hair metal, but like leather clad judas maiden kind of thing. I wasn't in a position to take any good photos, but the crowd was full of men in leather with long hair and beards, so that was pretty good. A movie about cavemen was projected onto the band.

Next was the Library. Kind of hard to describe this band. Imagine if Midnight Oil was formed in 2008 and was influenced by everything between 1980 and now, but especially by early 90s gay club music. The singer had a silver diamond studded whistle around his neck, but then the rest of the band looked ten years younger than him and were dressed in the high of nerdy post-hardcore fashion. If that makes any sense.







Third was Hunter Revenge. Hunter being AFI's bass player, this being his solo project. The main different I found was that the bass sound was lot more prominent and more distorted than on the CD, which made the music a bit more aggressive. Sadly it seemed that by then most of the hipster kids left and maybe 1/3 of the crowd was left. I wish that they projected a movie while they played, but oh well. Kind of hard to remember all the details I wanted to write about after two days. . .












The last band, Devil's Orchestra, was awful. Maybe a good idea, mix video, painting, and music together, but since the band played some kind of prog rock and the painter was less than 2nd rate (using house paint and spray paint), I left after the second song. The only cool thing about them is that they projected one of Mathew Barney's Cremasters mixed in with Battle Royal. I also liked how the guitar player and drummer where on two risers on the sides and the bass player below them in the middle, kind of an odd stage set up.



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(I am making a silly face because I was hoping Hunter would make one too, but oh well)