Opening for the Polyphonic Spree on Monday night at the El Rey Theater, was this strange guy wearing a goat mask at the top of his head and making both the strangest and most familiar noises. It was part electronic, part spatial guitar with Richard Strauss’ ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ in the mix of the opening and a few Star Wars visuals in the background.
The music was sometimes pulsating, sometimes all distortion, with him spending a lot of time bent over his multiple pedals on the floor; it was a space odyssey going through a black hole, mixed with funny toyish beats, upbeat grooves and soothing vocals, like a wild ride with no possible prediction of what’s was coming.
This is the oddest thing about this genre, there is no classic construction in the music, and everything looks possible,… fat swirls of sound giving birth to more grandiose electronic grooves, speedy accelerations and Doppler effects intertwined with familiar sounds of dogs barking, birds chirping or horse galloping. Yes, there were a lot of these animal sounds, like stuck between the warmth of the vocals and the experimental cacophonic jams.
It was weird and interesting, New Fumes (of real name Daniel Huffman), who has been part of numerous other bands and has even collaborated with the Flaming Lips (no surprise there), was looking like a sort of one-man band and beyond. His multi media installation was creating a sort of mystery wrapping his dense psychedelic chaos, which was the hardest thing to describe at the end, going all over the place, with no boundaries in his sonic exploration.
The animal noises could explain the goat mask, as if he was the real animal collective I suppose, although I would stop my Panda Bear comparison just right there.