THE HYPERSPACE ROCK SOUND

Pink Floyd was my first concert. Momentary Lapse Of Reason "reunion" tour. 1987. Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands. It was my first concert and, therefore, an important life event and one of my favorite music-related experiences. Any number of Crash Worship events, with its atavistic wine, milk, fruit, nudity, and drums were all intensely involving, lived experiences and some of my favorite music-related experiences.

Another of my favorites was Blind Idiot God at CBGB, around 1994/95. If Floyd was my favorite for its life event status and Crash Worship was my favorite for the lived experience, BIG might have been my favorite for tangible, musical force. It was simply awesome, in the classic sense.

The first thing that anyone in the room would have noticed was the wall to wall spread of futuristic, state-of-the-art-looking, five-foot tall speakers. Who the hell uses that much amplification? Why? And what are they possibly going to do with it? Next, your eyes went to the front and center of the stage where there stood the biggest drum set I have ever seen at a New York club show. This massive, double-bass edifice with maybe five rack toms, three floor toms and innumerable cymbals would have been perfectly at home on stage with Dave Lombardo or even Journey, if you added a orchestral gong behind the kit. Who the hell plays on a kit like that? In CBs? Why? And what is he possibly going to do with it?

The short answer to the above questions is that Blind Idiot God made me feel what it might be like to fly in the Millenium Falcon while inside one of its engines....and enjoy it. And I don't mean it in the masochistic "can you take the pain" or "how exteeeme can you go" senses. I mean that this was the most supersonic, levitationally massive (the band's guitarist, Andy Hawkins prefers "symphonically loud"), monolithically hyperspace musical performance I have heard.

The band’s sound is entirely instrumental and is based around harmonically complex guitar chording and throttling drumming (though the band also incongruously plays dub). Hawkins’s guitar sounds as though he has amassed several legions of guitarists, each playing its own esoteric chord on top of each other at such speeds that it isn’t clear where one chord ends and another begins. It’s as if he has condensed all of Glenn Branca’s guitar symphonies into one person and one guitar.

Yet BIG’s best stuff hits harder than any Branca piece. That’s where drummer Ted Epstein comes in. Simply put, you’d have to look far and wide to find a drummer that is doing so much and doing it with so much power and invention. Usually, the most athletic drummers (Lombardo, Mick Harris, etc) sacrifice some composition for their power and might even lighten-up as they speed-up while inventive, finesse drummers (Bill Bruford, etc) often sacrifice some wallop for their niftiness. Epstein doesn’t fall prey to either. He is constantly putting all sorts of cymbals in all sorts of unusual places, adding brilliant shading and tone to what he’s playing at any speed, even while he’s pummeling his huge set into utter oblivion.

It's when the two coordinate that BIG pulls off its most interesting trademark: the sudden acceleration/deceleration effect. Hawkins somehow bends his chords in such a way that sounds like his guitar's batteries are running low while Epstein and bass player, Gabe Katz, suddenly drop into a woozy, slow tempo to simulate the feeling of winding down, only to have Hawkins quickly strum some tight, higher chords as the rhythm section follows with thrash beats to bring everything from 15-150mph in one second. This is the Millenium Falcon "hyperspace" effect I was talking about, though I could see how it could just as easily be interepreted as whiplash.

But hyperspace does a better job of describing the physical exhilaration that this music can induce. The feeling of being compressed and expanded at the same time. Being sucked into a black hole and shot out into the infinite at the same time.

Did I mention the band also plays dub?

Last thing. BIG are playing the Knitting Factory on Friday night (July 21st) with Don Caballero. This is, I think, BIG's first concert in New York in around a decade. Word is, they may even have a new release coming out later this year. Either way, just go. Go. And make sure you're strapped in.

BLIND IDIOT GOD -- Thunderhead (from Cyclotron, 1992)

BLIND IDIOT GOD -- 747 (from Cyclotron, 1992)

BLIND IDIOT GOD -- Roller Coaster (from Undertow, 1988)