Venue: Channel Zero / Metelkova / Ljubljana
Concert date: 04/23/2013
Attendance: 150
Ticket price: €10 (early bird), €12 presale, €14 on the day of the show
Exactly one year ago, a new, young crew of concert promoters/organizers called Young Vibes entered the Slovenian music scene. After last April, when they brought two North American ”chillwave” acts (Teen Daze, Brothertiger) to Ljubljana’s Orto Bar, this year the same ”genre” quota brought an even bigger and more important electronic musician: Blackbird Blackbird.
Mikey Maramag (San Francisco) aka Blackbird Blackbird emerged years ago from the ”freshly minted” musical milieu of the so-called chillwave genre. The main standard-bearers of that sound were Neon Indian, Toro Y Moi and Washed Out, though the genre never got a concrete definition, of course. Chillwave was supposedly ambient dance pop with a touch of the eighties, bundling together all sorts of musical expression under one roof: from psych folk, nu gaze and witch house to classic electropop. The fact that the name was just a trend, a one-year fad, is shown by how all the artists mentioned above drifted (way) away from any classic ”chillwave creation” aesthetically, and pretty quickly after the ”genre” was born. We already have big problems with categorizing music in contemporary popular music (which is a peculiar phenomenon in its own right, but that’s for another time), and media (naming) constructs like this only make the situation worse and turn it into a total muddle (which is the complete opposite of what categorizing is for…). Definitely a label that doesn’t deserve to be called a genre. Fine, it’s true that at some point quite a few artists (mostly from the US West Coast and Canada) were making rather similar mood-driven music, so let the name go down in history as a snapshot of that summer, a moment of ”recession” and the zeitgeist of that corner of the world (/the world).
But since my aim today isn’t to dig into the genesis of the genre itself (and the broader problem of categorization), let the detour above serve only as a reminder that, in the end, what matters in music isn’t journalistic naming games but quality, and above all the feelings the music stirs up. And there were relaxed, positive feelings in abundance at Channel Zero (on Metelkova) that night. Although Blackbird Blackbird already experienced a full band incarnation in Seattle at the end of February (as the opener for Starfucker, whom we got a chance to hear at Kino Šiška in Ljubljana in November 2011), this time Mikey Maramag played for the Slovenian crowd completely alone. A microphone, a mixer and a laptop stood in for the backing band members, but you couldn’t tell at all from how organic the performance felt.
Blackbird Blackbird, whose music draws from the likes of Caribou, James Blake, Four Tet and Mount Kimbie, served us a proper dance hypnosis in a ninety-minute set. If the muted volume and half-empty room at the start of the show didn’t promise much, the picture changed completely somewhere around the first third. Mikey Maramag cranked up the volume, the club filled up nicely, and the dance-floor swaying began. Blackbird Blackbird put together an anthology that night and presented us with his entire discography, putting some emphasis, especially in the last tracks, on his newest (still unreleased) material. His dreamy, psychedelically tuned melodies were excellently topped off by his warm, slightly spaced-out vocals, which even the occasional fuzz didn’t make unpleasant or unnecessary. Since it was basically a survey of his work so far, there were frequent rhythmic wobbles and clumsy transitions and links into the next track. But Blackbird Blackbird did prove that pop sensibility can be combined really well with excursions into experimental musical waters. By his own insistence, the high point of the night was the last track of the set, ”It’s A War” from last year’s EP Boracay Planet (to date he has released only one LP, Summer Heart from 2010), though it quickly turned out that it wasn’t the last track at all. With every following song he claimed the same thing and kept the music going for at least another twenty minutes, until he finally landed in the arms of the crowd.
I’ll admit it, I expected nothing from this show, and I walked away with a lot. Blackbird Blackbird proved to be an artist who knows how to spoil a crowd and whip up good energy, without compromising on sound quality or, ”God forbid”, going commercial. He also showed that the ”chillwave” label was far too narrow for his musical output and served only as a kind of triumphant ”hipster trendsetting” and a money-making scheme for various labels and media outlets. Full credit for the effort and the organization goes to the Young Vibes crew, who teamed up with club CH0 to put together an excellent club night. It neither started nor ended with the main act: Kampl handled the opening, and after Mikey Maramag’s set Dj ENOK kept the crowd spinning. Young Vibes are already preparing their next event for early June (June 3), when they’ll host Slow Magic, Giraffage and Mister Lies at Ljubljana’s Brooklyn. Here’s to many more successful shows!
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