As an adult I find is increasingly rare to truly stumble onto new music that affects me the way it used to when I was younger. Sure, we’ve got Pandora and Spotify to occasionally surprise us, but when was the last time you had your mind melted by an artist that you’d never heard of? Those sort of musical “Eureeka!” moments seem to be sadly fewer and more far inbetween as I get older. The last time it happened for me was back in 2010. I was at work, piping New Jersey free-form radio station WFMU’s live feed into my headphones while I ticked off the minutes of my morning, and suddenly I was stopped dead in my tracks by the most amazing sounds. Dustin Wong (of Baltimore’s Ponytail) had popped by the NJ studio to do an epic live set in advance of a stop somewhere in Brooklyn, and I was hooked.
Aquarelle, Bastardgeist
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Good Style Shop
817 E. Johnson St.
8 PM; $5
Using a single guitar and a half-dozen or so looping pedals, Dustin was adding layer after layer of rich musical texture, stacking rhythm on top of melody on top of even more still, and then tossing an airy guitar solo on top for good measure. His music is so tightly constructed I’m honestly shocked that he doesn’t need sheet music in front of him to keep the dozens of movements seperate across his hour plus set.
So, after having my head cracked open I checked to see if he was swinging through Madison anytime soon, and sure enough less than a week and a half later he was scheduled to be at The Project Lodge. The few friends I was able to coerce into going to the show practically made up the entire audience. He sat on the edge of the stage with his string of multi-colored looping pedals splayed out in front of him, plugged in, and went to town.
Seeing him live is like watching a magician produce an endless rainbow of handkerchiefs from his thin air. The second you latch onto one of his grooves, it’ll start to slide out of sight over the horizon and will be replaced by another riff so good you won’t have time to miss what came before, and thus the cycle starts all over again.
Dustin’s back in Madison (with Chicago-based Bastardgeist and local ambient artist Aquarelle opening) tomorrow night at Good Style Shop (the very same storefront that formerly housed The Project Lodge). It’s five dollars and I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough.