Late Wednesday night I went to the Ovum showcase to see Josh Wink & Steve Bug. Totally rad. I don’t think I have ever seen Steve Bug happier. It was loud, hot, dark, and dank. Muggy and sweat-flavored. A raver’s paradise, if you could get past the fact that Bug + Wink does not equal unicorns and rainbows, and in fact more equals hallucinated mimes with small powertools, running amuck searching for where to plug the respective cords into.
I love the Bug. And I love Josh Wink. Their musicality and their performances are inspirational and genuine – dark, dirty, acidy, progressing through huge buildups just to end up approximately where the music was before. It’s a tease, and I know it. Their music makes me think of weirdness imploding into itself and then giggling, saying “Ha! Fooled you!” There isn’t necessarily always a lot going on musically. Bug and Wink aren’t known for being complicated; in fact they are usually very very careful, letting their listeners take emotional baby steps into the darker corners of the psyche, all the while maintaining that sometimes a banana is just a banana.
And Shine, as a venue? Yikes. It is certainly one of the caviest of the techno caves I have ever been to. Stairs that head downward into a pit in front of the DJ booth. Crazy lighting systems and sets of flown speakers hanging all over. If there was any place to see a Josh Wink vs. Steve Bug set, it was there.
It was a little hard to get a read on the crowd; it was too dark to see anything, and the masses of people wandering back and forth were just sort of like blurry chunks of temporary light.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPYcGMy4mVI
Yes. This, this right here is the techno womb, and we, we are the techno babies … Always fun to be reborn. :)
It was really crowded the whole time I was there, so I kept mostly to the outside fringes of the room. I did manage to station myself next to a low-lying couch/footrest thing of furniture, and in the blackness of the cave I saw quite a few people try to shortcut their way through the crowd and end up catching a quick full-frontal belly flop right near my shoes.
And then, in their dark sunglasses, they would look around and make sure nobody just saw them do a face plant into an invisible stretch ottoman. And they would note, that no one saw, except the dude in the red hat.
The floors was sticky and I got saddled with an overly large backpack for a while, so not too much dancing for me, just heady appreciation of two of my favorites working back and forth with each other on a stage built for their specialty, and a captive audience of voluntary suckers.
It was a long walk back to where I was staying, with a quick detour to head a little way down Collins, and a stop over to get a slice of Pizza Rustica. And then sleep, at least for a few hours.
15 Years of Ovum Showcase @ Shine: Bug & Wink
Late Wednesday night I went to the Ovum showcase to see Josh Wink & Steve Bug. Totally rad. I don’t think I have ever seen Steve Bug happier. It was loud, hot, dark, and dank. Muggy and sweat-flavored. A raver’s paradise, if you could get past the fact that Bug + Wink does not equal unicorns and rainbows, and in fact more equals hallucinated mimes with small powertools, running amuck searching for where to plug the respective cords into.
I love the Bug. And I love Josh Wink. Their musicality and their performances are inspirational and genuine – dark, dirty, acidy, progressing through huge buildups just to end up approximately where the music was before. It’s a tease, and I know it. Their music makes me think of weirdness imploding into itself and then giggling, saying “Ha! Fooled you!” There isn’t necessarily always a lot going on musically. Bug and Wink aren’t known for being complicated; in fact they are usually very very careful, letting their listeners take emotional baby steps into the darker corners of the psyche, all the while maintaining that sometimes a banana is just a banana.
And Shine, as a venue? Yikes. It is certainly one of the caviest of the techno caves I have ever been to. Stairs that head downward into a pit in front of the DJ booth. Crazy lighting systems and sets of flown speakers hanging all over. If there was any place to see a Josh Wink vs. Steve Bug set, it was there.
It was a little hard to get a read on the crowd; it was too dark to see anything, and the masses of people wandering back and forth were just sort of like blurry chunks of temporary light.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPYcGMy4mVI
Yes. This, this right here is the techno womb, and we, we are the techno babies … Always fun to be reborn. :)
It was really crowded the whole time I was there, so I kept mostly to the outside fringes of the room. I did manage to station myself next to a low-lying couch/footrest thing of furniture, and in the blackness of the cave I saw quite a few people try to shortcut their way through the crowd and end up catching a quick full-frontal belly flop right near my shoes.
And then, in their dark sunglasses, they would look around and make sure nobody just saw them do a face plant into an invisible stretch ottoman. And they would note, that no one saw, except the dude in the red hat.
The floors was sticky and I got saddled with an overly large backpack for a while, so not too much dancing for me, just heady appreciation of two of my favorites working back and forth with each other on a stage built for their specialty, and a captive audience of voluntary suckers.
It was a long walk back to where I was staying, with a quick detour to head a little way down Collins, and a stop over to get a slice of Pizza Rustica. And then sleep, at least for a few hours.