Nite Jewel / Memoryhouse / Baths

It’s hard to find a unifying factor that ties together this particular bill. “From Los Angeles” would work if it weren’t for Memoryhouse, who are Canadian. “Possibly danceable” would work if it weren’t for Memoryhouse, whose recordings aren’t particularly danceable and who were definitely not danceable in person, with their drum machines at least partially lost to a poor mix that almost swallowed them whole. “Experimental” might work, but it’s vague and reductive, and none of these musicians are taking similar risks. I could say something about mood, but there was no overlap; Will Wiesenfeld seemed utterly gleeful, Memoryhouse was frustrated, Ramona Gonzalez of Nite Jewel unreadable, and the half of Kisses DJing between Baths’ and Memoryhouse’s sets blasted “Baby” by Justin Bieber as loud as it could go. So I’m going to concede to being unable to tie this bill together in any meaningful way, as they were almost totally disparate in appearance, general demeanor, and success in communicating with the crowd in the cavernous, hollow, undersold Echoplex.

Will Wiesenfeld, Baths’ sole member, appeared overjoyed to be on stage, sharing his songs with us. Even by the standards of laptop-driven performance, Wiesenfeld is a minimalist; there are no visuals, no instruments onstage beyond his APC40, the computer it connects to, and a microphone through which he adds to his tracked, collaged vocal loops. The APC40, Akai’s specially-made Ableton Live controller, can be configured, like most controllers, to serve any number of purposes; it was thus essentially impossible to tell what, exactly, Wiesenfeld was doing onstage between looking giddy and thanking us for our presence. He could have been triggering samples, pitch-adjusting tracks, and reworking his material in real-time, but having only given Cerulean cursory listens at this point, I wasn’t familiar enough with the source material to know for sure. What was clear was the fact that his use of technology was seamless. His approximately 45-minute set moved from song to song without a second of downtime, and he fired a new set of musical ideas at the audience as soon as applause began for the last one. Combined with a wide-eyedness that paired perfectly with the music he makes, Wiesenfeld’s set was far more successful than it ought to have been and absolutely worth seeing, though as a hardware nerd I can’t help but wonder what exactly he’s doing up there.

Memoryhouse simply Aren’t There Yet. The band has only a four-song EP, albeit a very good one, to its name, and was derailed by sound and equipment problems that stopped their dreamscapes dead in their tracks. While Denise Nouvion’s voice sounded great, the band was completely unable to wring the textures from their guitars or their keyboards necessary to communicate what it is that makes them stand out from countless bands like theirs. When they broke out the bass guitar for one song it rumbled chests and was at least three times louder than everything else onstage, and while there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, it was clearly not what the band was shooting for; they apologized as soon as they finished the song. Along the way, Evan Abeele’s guitar amplifier died, prompting more downtime and even muddier sound.

A lot of these problems really weren’t necessarily the band’s fault. They weren’t hindered by a failure to perform so much as they were done in by their total inability to make the space or their equipment meet their needs. I can only hope that by the time of their next tour—hopefully they’ll have more material by then—that they find a way to make these issues that they can control, leaving them less at the mercy of cavernous, poorly-designed warehouses or sound guys unable to make them sound good in such spaces.

Nite Jewel was something else entirely. Ramona Gonzalez’ lo-fi approach to synthpop is a deeply weird and utterly singular thing, a combination of alien-sounding keyboards and a remarkably strong voice. Her five-piece band doesn’t simply expand upon her recordings’ arrangements; it actually translates the exact sound she creates on-record into something widescreen and perhaps slightly more sensible for mass consumption.

Even if it doesn’t connect with me completely, Gonzalez and her songs sounded particularly otherworldly in person. Her music, being played underneath static lights behind a red curtain, produced the most Lynchian atmosphere I’ve ever experienced in real life; she more than slightly resembled Julee Cruise performing at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks, and her songs occasionally nudge towards the same world that Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti evoked in their work together. One couple spent the entirety of her set making out, as if what was going on onstage was some sort of overpowering, all-consuming aphrodisiac. Dancing was not on the agenda; that’s not what Los Angeles does when presented with this kind of opportunity.