I suppose I've been in a concert-going mood as of late.
This Sunday, I ventured to Lewiston to the Androscoggin Bank Colisee to see renowned DJ and electronic sample artist Pretty Lights perform.
As any half-dozen college kids should, my counterparts and I entered the spacious hockey arena a tad late and ready to move.
Joining us were a motley crowd of Bates students, high schoolers (of whom there was a noticeable influx around 11:15 p.m.), and the occasional Bowdoin student (who we greeted with a circumstantially abridged version of the "Bowdoin hello").
The area was full of security guards and police officers who attened to quite a few cases over the course of the night; it was certainly an odd environment for a pleasant Sunday evening in Maine.
And then Pretty Lights (the alias of Derek Vincent Smith) took the stage and let out an opening tone that could only be described as mammoth; it resonated deep in the bottom of our eardrums, setting off three hours of pure movement and thick sound.
As my fellow music columnist Ryan Erskine wrote last week, solid electronic or dub step music does not solely operate on an auditory level, but resonates physically as well.
But unlike conventional dub step tracks, Pretty Lights does not simply build up a beat for a satisfying bass drop.
Pretty Lights keeps you in suspense—on the down beat you expect the bass drop but he continued the measure another several beats and then fed back the rhythm and the melody in some new form.
Smith's style to tease and withhold the drop forces listeners to engage with the song, adapt to the new rhythm and move with it toward a sonic catharsis.
But the drop never came—he continued to re-feed these beats and synth parts to you such that no true release was ever achieved. For Pretty Lights, it's about the build—the journey, so to speak.
Of all the sensory phenomena I was encountering, perhaps none were more spectacular than the DJ's namesake: the intense, pretty, and expansive lights flashing behind him.
His stage was constructed with several illuminated boxes sitting in front of a wall of individual LED lights; these lights would often coalesce into forms resembling molecules or cityscapes along the backdrop. Abundant strobe and spotlights flashed as unexpectedly as the music moved from beat to beat.
A highlight of the evening was some stranger strolling by our circle of dancers and handing all of us a pair of disposable 3-D glasses that intensified and contorted the lights around us, adding dimensions to the strobes, blending and mixing the visual to enhance the audio.
After about an hour and a half, Smith left the stage, leaving only the flickering bulbs on the back wall to illuminate an otherwise black arena, surely an expected ploy for raucous cheering and an ensuing encore. The audience began to throw their glow sticks (of which there were hundreds) up to the rafters and across the crowd.
The multi-sensory experience Smith began continued in his absence with this slow flicker above and a loud rumble of cheering below.
This impressive display of audience participation (no dancing lost in the process) was promptly cut short by an emphatic sounding of the lead horn section of Kanye West's "All of the Lights." What followed with great electro/dub step fervor was the most energetic rendition of said Kanye West song since a few older folks played it on cellos (see the Portland Cello Project).
At one point, Pretty Lights combined the forceful guitar and beats of Nine Inch Nails with the droned vocals of Kurt Cobain and the electro-ambience of Radiohead's "Idioteque." Listening to it all together was kind of like an auditory scavenger hunt.
Samples construct an essential part of the Pretty Lights sound; many songs are built upon old funk and R&B vocals meshed with hip-hop beats.
And because so much of his work is built on samples, he's given away his music for free for most of his career.
At the end of the evening, Smith grabbed the microphone again (which he had only used thus far to build hype and offer his gratitude) and delivered a short soliloquy about the feeling of sharing music with others in a kind of rapture.
He then proceeded to play his most popular track, "Finally Moving." I had been waiting all night to hear that song, and even though it almost felt out of place— it lacked the aggressive or heavy tonal quality of earlier numbers—it elevated the concert to more than just listening and dancing. Pretty Lights managed to get nearly 600 people to sing the chorus of the song, and the round continued until there was no longer music playing, just the howling of a crowded hockey arena in Lewiston.
*As an addition to the column, I've decided to include a small weekly playlist consisting of five songs I find important or am listening to frequently. Without further ado, this week's five "Hum and Beats:"
Pretty Lights — "Finally Moving"
Denver — "Los Adolescentes"
St. Vincent — "Cruel"
Washed Out — "Amor Fati"
College — "A Real Hero"