LIVE JOURNAL 9/24: The Tape Deck Goes To A Porter Robinson Concert

Photos by me (taken on an iPhone 7 Plus alright don’t @ me)

There was a moment halfway into this show, when the bass had subsided enough to feel my chest reverberating like a tuning fork, when I found myself racking my brain trying to figure out if I’d ever been to an EDM concert. Surely – surely – that can’t be the case. I’m almost through with my twenties, and I grew up during a time when rave culture in America had verifiably exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry. AVICII and Skrillex were becoming international superstars during my college years. I couldn’t have missed all of it; I might as well hang up my hat right now, the gray cap that says “aspiring music journalist” in ivory Impact font.

Yet standing next to a friend of mine who had graciously invited me to this packed event – and was subsequently losing his mind to the “Shelter” music video playing in the background – I came to the conclusion that this was indeed the first EDM concert I’d ever attended.

Also, by extension, it was the first EDM concert I’d ever attended sober.

Well, maybe that’s not wholly true: I tried to ply myself with a pair of strong IPAs beforehand hoping they would last me the four-or-so hours it would take to get me through a concert where I could palpably feel my age. Molly had become a viable option in the days prior, but I’d never taken it before and was afraid of doing it for the first time in an uncontrolled environment, so I passed. That may have been a mistake; looking back, it’s possible that up to eighty percent of the sold-out crowd was high on some sense-heightening drug, so maybe I should’ve bitten the MDMA bullet in the spirit of full participation. How many times has Porter Robinson released a new record?

At least I’m writing this with just sore calves and not a nagging depression wreaking havoc on the back of my eyeballs, but take all this with a grain of salt: in no way was I in the correct state of being for a spectacle like this. Here’s how the concert went.

All of these thoughts are solely mine; all of these experiences are solely mine. If you don’t like it, you can go [drink a warm turmeric latte for those sweet, sweet anti-inflammatory properties.]

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JAMES IVY

If it weren’t for the restless excitement emanating from my younger benefactor, I probably would have missed this opener just on an energy-saving principle. I’m really glad I didn’t though. Running a tight thirty-minute set (like, 8:00 to 8:30 on the dot), NYC artist James Ivy mixed a certain sprightly abandon (think Matty Healy without the leaden pomposity) with a distinct nostalgic edge. If this music were a smell, it’d be store-brand cologne hastily-applied under a brand-new T-shirt. You could see why Porter Robinson wanted him on the tour; their aesthetics matched up sublimely, and Ivy’s live instrument of choice was the electric acoustic, which occasionally added a subtle warm touch to the sharp bounce of his songs.

As a first opener, Ivy did the hard part of amping up a crowd mostly there to see EDM’s heir apparent, though judging from his knowing banter, he’s had some cult hits himself. Without doing much research (bad journalist alert, I know) I caught tracks like “Last Star” and “Headset Go” receiving distinct audience enthusiasm. The former is a close descendant of THAT kind of ’90s pop-rock song, you know the one – Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” and Spin Doctor’s iconic “Two Princes” (the latter now thirty years old, if you can believe it). It’d be fun to see a mash-up, but I’m too tired to do it myself. The latter falls in the same featherweight rock camp; mildly shoegazey but also mildly Britpop, the fact that it’s led by guitar endears me to it, and the other fact that it’s among his newest tracks makes me eager to follow what this relatively-fresh artist is gonna do in the future.

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JAI WOLF

Now THIS is what I was expecting going in: one man, dressed in what looked like a deconstructed track suit (is that a thing? I don’t fully understand textiles) standing in front of a podium, moving less than a foot in any direction but skyward, hyping up the crowd with just about everything else that one lone man couldn’t possibly accomplish on the fly.

Enormous, prepared astronaut-based visuals like an Winamp interpretation of the final twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, dopamine-eliciting beats equalized to blast you out of your personal space if you’re not battening yourself down…you know, I realize this probably isn’t anything of note to anybody whose been to tons of these shows before, but for someone who was processing all of these stimuli in real-time, forming new connections within an alcohol-soaked brain, it felt positively revelatory. This, I guess, is what I had missed all those years ago.

According to my sources (and I spent three whole minutes on Wikipedia to write this down) Jai Wolf, born Sajeeb Saha, signed to ODESZA’s Foreign Family Collective during the first peak of the EDM craze and garnered support from Skrillex based on a killer bootleg remix. It apparently took him years after his big mid-2010s singles to lay down a full-length: 2019’s The Cure to Loneliness, which was received open-armed but mildly, the way you’d expect a long-awaited record from a trend-riding EDM artist to be received.

One of the last songs of his set was the album’s lead single, the “indie”-laced “Lose My Mind,” and its presence felt like a huge outlier. Compared to the gigantic bass drops and ear-shattering synths of the previous half an hour, it felt like elevator music, like a quizzical comedown. Looking around, you could tell people wanted to jump, to do something, but without that soul-swallowing low end prompting them, it was a bit of a no-go.

It’s a shame, because listening to that record for the first time I actually think it plays well. Maybe it’s because I appreciate the chiller vibes that you’d want out of a headphones listen. I wonder if that’s the big creative conundrum for a lot of artists working in this genre: you get yourself wrapped in a situation when you’re younger where you’re stoked to fill all of your songs with ridiculous peaks and valleys that play well in a huge stadium, and then when you feel like slowing things down or honing your craft to something a little more nuanced it doesn’t play as well to the people looking for a more physical release. Jai Wolf’s set blew my face away through sheer force, but to me it was the lowest-impact of the three acts by nature of its uniformity; my expectations were met but not subsumed, as if I were attending a surprise party I organized myself.

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PORTER ROBINSON

Here’s the proof positive that I completely missed out on the EDM surge during my formative years; when my friend invited me to this show, I had to look up who Porter Robinson was. Isn’t that sad? And then what clued me in to this tragedy was that just about everybody afterward who happened to poll me about what I was doing that Friday night knew him, probably because they were all my age and had experienced first hand how influential his music had become. Had I actually lived under a rock that whole time? Was I actually just Patrick Star with a Logic Pro X account and a desolate Soundcloud?

The story is that Robinson, a teen who signed to Skrillex’s label in 2010, did a lot of things that set the tone for a good deal of EDM in the mid-‘10s: helping standardize live music and sampling in what had increasingly become a genre content to feature “plug-and-play” DJ sets; infusing a novel (for that era, anyway) affection for video game soundtracks into his work; nailing a collection of accompanying visuals that heightened his music’s sense of narrative. If you’ll notice, much of that is linked to his abilities as a performer. Purely on grooves, his giant 2014 debut Worlds isn’t anything truly remarkable – save, perhaps, for a certain transportive adventurousness – but people remember it in association with its tour, which highlighted exactly what made Robinson special as an artist.

This is likely why, after announcing a tour for his new record Nurture, the Seattle stop had sold out within the day – so fast, in fact, he felt obligated to booked a second show at the same venue. Nobody will tell you the WaMu is the best venue for a show like this, and listening with earplugs in made me understand why: the subs tended to overpower everything, creating a little pocket in the crowd that both swallowed the audience in bass and left enough of a frequency range to allow the crowd noise to bleed through. Nevertheless, over his ninety-minute set, Robinson demonstrated exactly why he now holds a generation-spanning legion of fans. As someone who (let me remind you again) has never been to an EDM concert, and as someone whose two beers had already worked overtime and were mostly wearing off, this guy was fantastic.

It wasn’t just the visuals or the production gimmicks, which were both clever and fitting for his new collection of life-affirming, naturalist dance tracks. It was the way he genuinely looked happy to be on stage, rolling around and lying down and doing clumsy back somersaults and sitting in front of his piano looking the part of a scorned child. It’s all theater of course, but the best performers can convince you it’s not, and the energy that Robinson brought to the stage was infectious even to me, a new listener rapidly exiting his twenties.

The set also ran like clockwork, which felt like a miracle to someone who has no knowledge of how to put together such an experience: save for one hiccup – a barely-chugging live webcam that was probably depending on T-Mobile to do the hard work – everything ran as smooth as could be. The crowd knew all the hits and they sang along readily, leaving me to pull a Dana Carvey from Wayne’s World and mouth along reticently like a sock puppet. Did I need to? No, but it was the kind of show that made me want to learn the lyrics, which signifies a job well done.

Plenty of people all around me were going justifiably apeshit for the new classics – “Look at the Sky,” admittedly, is still stuck in my head – but I remember the slower moments the most. The parts when Robinson wiped the sweat off his face and dug into the piano-led “Blossom” or the shape-shifting instrumental “Wind Tempos” appealed greatly to my weary, enervated carcass. I could take a moment, lean against the barrier, close my eyes and attempt to extricate all of their beautiful little details in real time without the pressure to wave a hand or pull out a flashlight. It’s how I prefer listening to music, but in a live setting, faced with the helpful assistance of verdant imagery and surrounded by people who were likely doing the same exact thing, those moments felt connective in a way that momentarily pulled me out of the callous cynicism that continually plagues me. “Life-affirming” is the right term here; I get it now.

Would I ever go to another EDM concert again? Not unless I buy some molly, a drug-testing kit, and a pair of lab goggles that I can remove to say “This compound contains no traces of synthetic cathinones,” or whatever the fuck. Until then, I’m grateful I went to this one. At the very least I got to live a belated alternate existence, one where I pogoed with thousands of people in a moment of candid unity, the clothes on my back fluttering in the frequency.