The DFA Remix Tour
The secret of live music is that location is everything. A good venue, with a balanced mix and clear sightlines, enhances mediocre performances, while an ill-fitting one squashes them. This may seem obvious, but a show’s quality is often credited to performances alone, and that’s not always the case.
Take Thursday’s DFA Remix Tour at the Church. The 116-year-old Episcopalian cathedral is creepy-cool, featuring three converted floors and even a sushi bar. Its cavernous main room, where DFA DJs James Murphy and Marcus Lambkin were spinning, also sports fickle acoustics and myriad visual distractions.
Murphy, head of New York’s excellent DFA Records, came on after a booming set by Little Mike. He immediately knocked the energy down by switching to an all-vinyl playlist. The drop in volume and intensity virtually cleared the floor. Go-go dancers and an annoying stilt walker filled it briefly until a bungee-cord acrobat emptied it again, the onlookers agape at his pointless antics.
The diversions faded but the music stayed low-key, Murphy’s weak transitions injuring the momentum of his disco-rock flow. When Lambkin took over the DJ booth more people seemed to be heading for the smoking patio than the dance floor. Of course, Lambkin’s subdued set was partly to blame, the beats hitting softer than even during Murphy’s.
The Church has undergone a few revisions since it was converted nearly 10 years ago (including plasma screens and new lighting rigs) and an acoustic overhaul is probably unrealistic. But at least warn the Luddite, vinyl-toting DJs that they need to bring their best, loudest game in order to connect with the masses below.|John Wenzel
Califone/Brent Green
Five years ago, budding animated filmmaker Brent Green contacted his five favorite bands, offering collaboration. The Flaming Lips, Tom Waits and Smog never responded, but Chicago’s Califone immediately put Green to work, as did, later, Vic Chesnutt.
For the first hour of Monday’s remarkable show at the Hi-Dive, Califone provided profound live accompaniment to Green’s experimental films that are so dark and sadly sweet they make Tim Burton seem like Mickey Mouse.
Green’s fantastic, surreal stories seem to have sprung to life from the cold sweat of his fever dreams. His short animated films were intermixed with several new Califone live-action videos (“Spider’s House”), with Green providing haunting, nervous narration in such a quavering way, he seems Conor Oberst’s doppelganger of the animated film world.
The film “Francis” (this one written by Califone’s Tim Rutili) tells of an elderly woman at the end of her life who taunts the bears in her backyard into finishing her off. “Hadacol Christmas” is the story of a Santa Claus who drinks a cough syrup that’s 50 percent whiskey, which has made his liver huge and caked with blood. All the while, Califone’s haunting, swirling live beats bring each tale to crescendos of visceral emotion.
Green’s final film, “Paulina Hollers,” (which debuts at L.A.’s Getty Museum in November), tells of a woman who shoots herself and goes to hell so she can search for her dead son. These stories may sound horrible, but each is bathed in an indescribable loveliness.
Green’s final words: “The world is beautiful. I can’t believe we are always forgetting that.” (visit myspace.com/nervousfilms for more).|John Moore
