MICE PARADE, KID 606 AND FRIENDS IN NOLA
Friday, March 16th, at
the Mermaid Lounge was an odd combination of music that was almost
accidentally placed together. Mice Parade alone were originally booked
for that particular night, and then, somewhat out of the blue, Kid 606
and Blectum from Blechdom started slowly showing up on the flyers and
lists of events as playing on this same night. There was some confusion
as to the validity/truth of this amongst New Orleanians, but it turned
out to be an interesting show.
First up on stage was local act, Nocturnal Transmissions, which is one
guy who fiddled with a 303 for about 20 minutes, making some really
nice waves of melodies despite the drunken idiots who danced in mockery
amongst the crowd. He stepped off, and then Kevin Blectum (from
Blechdom from Blectum from Blechdom...), took to stage with her Wesley
Willis-esque styled mock cabaret tunes. She started with a song in
which she screamed her love of "BAD MUSIC, BAD MUSIC!" in a truly
horrible voice, while her backing laptop kept shutting off at wrong
moments and she seemed a little distressed. Despite this, though, her
show was highly entertaining and she definitely woo'ed the audience and
sold more merchandise than the others because of her hilarious
performance skills. Her shining moment was her "love song" to
boyfriend, Kid 606, in which she sang lyrics such as "... and it's only
getting better, cuz my pussy's getting wetter! ... this sexual
sensation is rockin' the nation!" and kept making references to her
love for some Kid named Miguel.
Her set ended at about 12:30am, and it took Mice Parade a while to set
up, as they had a wide array of unidentifiable instruments that seemed
difficult to cram all onto the Mermaid's small stage. They managed,
though, and their set began at about 1am, with 6 people on stage,
including Adam Pierce and Him/June of '44's Doug Scharin. The
instrumentation was beautiful just to look at, with electric violin, a
dulcimer looking thing, something that could have been a bouzouki,
along with drums and keyboards. Unfortunately, the audience was torn
between being really intensely entranced by the nice music, talking
about the latest sales at JC Penney's and the new Tortoise album, and
wandering out as it got really late.
They ended at a little after 2am, and at 2:20am — late even for a
Mermaid encore — Kid 606 finally brought his two apple laptops up on
stage to rape the audience's eardrums with killer beats which morphed
in and out of flowing sinsister noiseS (note: not noise). The sounds
seemed surprisingly tame (much less glitch-oriented) for Kid 606.
Although, considering it was about 3am, the audience seemed somewhat
appreciative of the slight change. He ended at 3:20am, and all was
quiet. The night was over and the audience was worn - but in a good
way, like comfortable shoes or sleepiness after a hard night of
listening to awesome music for over four hours. -
