Music Dissolves Water: Athens

Kishi Bashi performed an energetic and joyful set last night at the Georgia Theater in his hometown of Athens as part of something called the Slingshot Festival. Slingshot appears to be Athens' way of observing March Madness.

Spread over four city blocks and dozens of venues, the Slingshot Festival included international, national, and local acts, boundary-pushing artworks throughout the urban environment, and, as increasingly common at music festivals these days, tech talks with leading innovators during the day, so that IT folks can attend and write it off their taxes as "training" and "networking." Little wonder it's held before April 15.

Slingshot's Saturday night sets at the Georgia Theater opened with Atlanta's Today the Moon, Tomorrow the Sun.

It was our second time seeing TTMTTS, after 2012's Atlanta Film Festival Sound + Vision event (for some reason, it seems we only see them as a part of some larger enterprise). They put on a good set of their highly danceable, electro-pop music, although the Athens audience by and large resisted shaking their asses and just stood here and watched.

The next band up was Athens' Electrophoria.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Electrophoria. According to their band bio, "Core members Kai Riedl (Macha) and Suny Lyons (pacific UV) have criss-crossed the globe (mainly to Java Indonesia) recording everything from bands in darkly-lit nightclubs in bustling cities to bamboo huts way way off the grid." Here's a sample recording from Kai's Soundcloud page:

Apparently, it didn’t stop there, as Riedl and Lyons then used those recordings to build new songs with the sounds in these field recordings, taking loops, samples and segments of the songs, and remixing, re-imagining, and integrating them with musicians from in and around Athens into a variety of styles, including pop, dance, ambient, electronica, and experimental. But I didn't hear any exotic loops or remixed world music last night. Maybe I was expecting to hear a funkier version of the New Age band Deep Forest, but other than some interesting and challenging time signatures by their remarkable drummer, they sounded more like a slightly goth electronica band, which isn't a bad thing at all (they were quite good), but not what I was expecting, is all.

Kishi Bashi took the stage at 11 sharp, after his usual prelude of Ravel's Bolero played over the PA.

Bashi was extremely animated and energetic throughout the set, dancing around the stage and working the audience up. His music was as fun and joyful as ever, an explosion of pop melodies and complex loops, supported by the "space banjo" of collaborator Tall Tall Trees (Mike Savino).

Kishi Bashi may not be a household name, but almost everybody knows his music, even of they don't know who it's by, from that ubiquitous Windows 8 commercial from last year:

Bright Whites, the song from that commercial, was the second song in his set, much to the delight of everybody in the Georgia Theater. So that I don't leave you with just a tease, here's the full version of Bright Whites as performed in the KEXP studios:

Bashi played most of the songs from his excellent debut LP, 151a, as well as several new songs from his upcoming Lighght (his spelling, not my typo). Last night, he played with a backing band and he also played several songs solo, just his violin, his voice, and his loop repeater, with no loss in the fullness of the sound.

The encore included a very unexpected cover of Paul McCartney and Wings' Live and Let Die of all things.

The set also concluded with confetti cannons, slingshots attempting (not very successfully) to shoot t-shirts and glow sticks into the audience, and Bashi stage-diving into the audience and breaking a pinata with a stick over the heads of the crowd.