Thursday, July 26, 2007

Is this a good scene?

Here is a review of an underground music festival in Baltimore. I'm not really sure if it is meant to be a good review or not. You decide.

Pitchfork Feature: Live: Whartscape Music Festival: "But enthusiasm is one of the only real unifying factors at Whartscape: Performers ranged from the folk and lo-fi beats of Lizz King (who hopped around on a sprained ankle as big as an orange) to the shoegaze synth-punk of Videohippos (who played in front of three projection screens) to West Coast spazz legends xbxrx to, well, a band like Santa Dads, who wallowed in a 20-minute prog-folk number with a whole faux-liturgy to go along with it; it was like a nursery school doing a rock opera. Dig a stroke deeper though, and the connections are clear: Baltimore's foreboding landscape and rotted-out, no-bubble depression is just the place for a bunch of wayward kids in neon avoiding the bodice of career, pulling shifts at Whole Foods between their self-directed studies in the occult. The filmmaker Jimmy Joe Roche, who screened videos on Friday night, told the Baltimore blog Butter Team, 'The wizards of Baltimore and Wham City deal powerful magic, we'll need it soon, the dawn of this post-postmodern age is upon us.'

There's no sense of cool, there's no spiritual sobriety. There are a lot of very bright colors. There are machines modified to blare industrial light at changes in synthesizer frequency. "

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