Orb
with Chemical Brothers at Avalon
by Malcolm E
This guy I know said he’d hook me up with some ‘shrooms if we could get into the show. I pulled a few strings, and we slid in as smooth as a sheet of coarse-grain sandpaper. Good thing I had a few contact names. So we’re in, we drop, and we wait, staring at these huge boxes dangling from the ceiling as a DJ spins some tepid beats to the already full audience. Soon, I see my friend starting to glaze out and giggle. Looks like he’s off to a good start, but I’m still not feeling anything. I’m wondering if I got burned, when the lights dim and two guys walk on stage. There’s some cheering. Orb has come. It seems like the audience size has doubled. People are jammed together like the proverbial Culpae pilchardus, and it’s starting to annoy me. But one look at the lightshow Orb is putting on temporarily makes me forget about the piles of humanity surrounding me. Images twist and distort, while little globes of light fly about the screen. I blink, and somewhat disappointedly realize that, no, the drugs are not about to kick in, it’s just the light show. Orb starts throwing in some samples, sound tracks, mixing some very cool beats over them, and the I realize they’ve got quadraphonic sound going on. There are four sets of speakers surrounding the audience, and Orb starts fading back and forth, spiraling the sound around us. Even when some of their instruments stopped working, they were ready. A sample of “we are experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by” started looping, and as soon as the problems were taken care of, they got back to work. I noticed a couple of things – one, the drugs still hadn’t kicked in, and two, for all their cool breakbeats and Drum ‘n’ Bass shenanigans, they never really kept a groove going long enough to settle into the bones. As cool as the entire environment was, I couldn’t really get my ass swingin’. Orb was playing it like a dance club, but there was no room to dance. It was about this time there grew within me an inordinate dislike towards humanity in general. What with a fifteen minute wait to get a drink at the bar, and a basic inability to move more than a few sweaty-body-sliding steps at a time, and me still not getting off, the Avalon was slowly turning into a fetid pit of human flesh.
As their set ended, I was able to relocate my “friend,” and I told him of my conundrum. He sympathized, and then brought out his one-hit bat. Bless his soul! I felt the warm green buzz settle through my body, and we were soon out on the floor, where I ran into an absolutely gorgeous woman-friend of mine, blasted on X, grinning her cute little butt off. The set change was incredibly long, but we didn’t really seem to notice, we were getting high and dancing to the DJ (isn’t it amazing what a little rush can do for your attitude towards techno music?). Then, up on the big screen, the words began flashing: “The Brothers Gonna Work It Out.” Chaos ensued.
What’s even better is that the crowd started to thin out, too. I guess they all got over tired trying to dance to Orb (the crowd actually resembled an amoeba trying to play hopscotch). Their loss. Blasting out their beats, The Chemical Brothers took a different attitude to their set. Whereas Orb was essentially DJ-ing a club, the brothers were playing a rock ‘n’ roll show. They worked the crowd like it was just another knob on the mixing board. They’d get a beat going, throw on a bunch of sound effects, and then they’d start to tweak ’em. The frequencies would get higher and higher, reach a breaking point, and then, BOOM! It would all come plunging down to the beat again. They kept working us like that, keeping the four on the floor beat (you know, “bam, bam, bam, bam”), sliding between songs. I had a small problem with that, because the beats on Dig Your Own Hole are so cool, I wanted to get down to them. This was especially true when they started messing with “Setting Sun.” They kept teasing us with it, but never broke through into the “Tomorrow Never Knows” -ish beat (one that I find particularly fascinating). But I just took another hit, and things smoothed out. The Brothers started messing with the quadraphonics when they went into “The Private Psychedelic Reel.” That’s when I started noticing the lights. How can you not when huge klieg lights lining either side of the stage are swung directly out into the audience? Under the heavy white light, with a jacked-up bass, I was stunned, a deer in headlights. The lights were so bright, it seemed like silence. Then The Brothers took out the low end, boosted the highs, and I realized that the tweeters were hanging from mirror balls on either side of me. They started flipping the sound back and forth between them, the lights kept going, it felt like a church hall. With a final blast, and leaving a feedback loop, The Brothers left the stage, only to come back a few minutes later to do some more. I also did some more, and things got hazy. I ended up back at my apartment with my friend at 5 AM. Work tomorrow? Hell no.
