we got aceeeeid

this week new yorkers had two chances to see kid606, wednesday and friday. bianca, ben, and i chose the wednesday option, mostly because bitshifter is playing at the knitting factory old office on friday. apparently, not a lot of other people made this choice.

with doors at northsix advertised as 8:30 and the show scheduled for 9, i thought my showing up unintentionally late at around 10 would mean i'd miss openers eats tapes. turns out they'd only been on for 15 minutes or so. i assume the time was pushed back to allow more people to show up, but the room was sparsely populated, with the bulk of the crowd sittting on the bleachers (which always remind me of nirvana's "smells like teen spirit" video). i did like eats tapes and their simple four-on-the-floor techno with the requisite bleeps and beats in all the right places. i wasn't blown away but they did an admirable job in an unenviable position. most people there for kid606's manic genre-mashing and breakneck beats might be unimpressed by the duo's fairly straightforward analog worship. at one point they did add a screaming vocalist, who clashed with the otherwise great track. but i appreciate them trying something somewhat out of the ordinary.

knifehandchop took over right away with no break. this was a one-man laptop project. while he didn't have anything in the way of a show, he did bring the beats. he impressively shifted microgenres over the course of the set, calculating which one would take things up a notch. i liked it most when the kick drums were electronic, overloaded, and pounding relentlessly, with acid synths weaving their way in and out in short hook-like phrases. the music was damn good and kept a few brave souls moving a lot. he strangely ended with a track that could have been a new instrumental backing for a new depeche mode song (i mean that as a compliment). it was a nice way to end a good set, and wound us down a bit before the expected assault of kid606.

after a break of several minutes, i recognized miguel depedro walking by us towards the stage. he took his place behind his sticker-plastered laptop, external mixer, tb-303, and moogerfooger and did something unexpected: he opened with a total experimental noise glitchfest. after the inside of our craniums were scraped clean, he did something else i would not have predicted. he actually gave us the "acid set" that was promised to us at the rothko show months ago. i loved that show, because it was very high-energy; he started blasting on high and somehow still kept raising it to another level every minute, keeping the speed and number of samples at an incredibly high rate. however, it wasn't realy much acid in my opinion. this show fulfilled that description. he kicked in the 303 and tweaked his moogerfooger to mind-bending effect. the tempos were much more conducive to dancing steadily and the music was more lush. he still threw in his trademark crazy parts, most notably his totally glitchy, near-unrecognizable cutup of dj rob base & ez rock's "it takes two". i've always hated that song, but kid 606 has a way of taking tracks i don't like and twisting them until i do.

after the show was over, i caught my breath by the merch table where i picked up the new kid 606 CD and one by knifehandchop. miguel depedro wandered over to talk to my friend charles (better known as end.). since we i was nearby, we struck up a conversation.

i found out those of us who took the wednesday option made the right choice. as some may know, this show was originally to be at temple bar. miguel told me that fell through last week and was moved to northsix. then it turned out that friday at southpaw was somehow double-booked, so that show won't be happening. although northsix's spaciousness on wednesday night meant that my advance ticket purchase through ticketweb was unnecessary, i think i got the better deal than those who were waiting until friday.


the title of this post is a paraphrase of a classic acid sample.