my review of the Walt Disney Concert Hall show with Dntel, Boom Bip, John Tejada and the Orb

So I went to the Disney Orb thing. Had lotsa fun running around the building. Dntel played mostly directionless hums+clicks, which I enjoyed a lot for some reason. Boom Bip were ... decent post-rock but nothing I wanted to sit and listen to for extended periods. John Tejada played sick sick tech-house, of course. And the Orb...

What to say about the Orb? Everybody else got 45 minutes, they got three hours. They were two bald guys, one German and neat and sort of hyperactive, the other English and looking like a washed-up old punk.

Basically, Thomas Fehlmann played all the good shit using a Powerbook. Alex Paterson would try to mix stuff in using some turntables and cd decks. His beatmatching was absolutely shit for most of the night, one time Fehlmann just cut his sound and went into Because/Before, after which Alex stormed off stage.

Thomas spent the first two hours trying to hold the set together while Alex trainwrecked all over the place, all while nursing Alex's ego (coaxing him back onstage etc.) Apparently he got sick of this, because the last hour was Alex, solo, playing a mediocre dj set.

But there were some great moments: the first part of the set, when Fehlmann got the crowd dancing (including a bunch of people right up front, security was freaked). Me and my friend were thinking Paterson wasn't even going to show up, when we noticed a fat old punk dancing on the side of the stage. He seemed ecstatic.

And when Alex's beatmatching worked, the fusion of his stuff with Fehlmann's was perfect. (In my unkinder moments I wished Fehlmann would just give him a bunch of buttons to press to trigger amusing sound samples, and leave the beats alone.)

last timestamped: 13:08:02 21-Mar-2006
in categories:Music/L.A., Music/Events