One night last week my wife and I saw a video on AUX TV from The Crystal Method performing their hit Double Down Under. It was a mix of many performances over many nights at the infamous Electric Daisy Festival. The band was on it’s Divided By Night Tour at the time and by the look of the 10,000 in attendance, it was one of those shows that you wish you had been there.
Heralded as ‘one of the best live dance acts on Earth,’ by the Village Voice (USA)
It was a very moving video. I found myself taking apart the song section by section in my mind, I’m always doing that to any music that I hear. It also got my heart a pumping and adrenalin a racing with the strong beats and bridges that it had. The visual effects that the band uses is not for those with the faint of heart. It could trigger an epileptic seizure for those afflicted with that disease if exposed to, for too long. It makes one wonder how much it costs the venue in electricity for a show like this, just a side thought.
TCM belongs to the style named the American Music genre. The band consist of two members, Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland. Both of them were born in and local DJ’s in the Las Vegas, Nevada. Their studio albums are as follows
* Vegas (1997)
* Tweekend (2001)
* Legion of Boom (2003)
* Drive: Nike + Original Run (2006)
* Divided by Night (2009)
Rolling Stones (R.S.) call them a pair of basement beat scientists. This is a reference to where the band started off in, while perfecting their trade. As the story goes, they bought a home in Glendale, California, which had a small underground shelter beneath the front lawn. R.S. says the techno kings as comfortable on the dance floor as on rock radio, and just as wildly uneven. They also add that the band’s live performances throb with raw inspiration and intense sexual energy.
From a musicians point of view, dance music doesn’t seem all that much challenging at first glance. I use to share in that mindset until I was introduced to it by an old friend Rick Jones from the now defunct G-Force Media of Toronto. It was quite the exposure to this new genre of music that I did not appreciate up until then. He was also the guy that brought to my attention the Tone Port Line 6 and the APEX 420 microphone. The guy was a wizard sitting behind his massive sound board deep inside his recording studio.
Rick is a natural keyboardist with tons of other technical talent to boot. He showed me how he used loop effects, how to program them, then bring them up to be used at the drop of a finger during any song.
I have only a general interest in this form of music because it brings me to a place that I would normally in the past not appreciate. I am referring to the level of musicianship that I thought went along with it, that is. I now think of this type of music as very challenging in it’s own right.
So what do you think of The Crystal Method and their classification of music plus do you listen or play this school of playing?
Keep on Jammin’
