Old Growth, White Rainbow, Evolutionary Jass Band

Well, that was exactly what I needed. At the start of this block, I was definitely feeling tired and music saturated. Old Growth started and I could really hear or understand them, even though they were incredibly loud. They come from the Santa Cruz transplant, Drive Like Jehu-influenced, noise rock world and they have a bit of an early punk feeling (a fact I reconstructed afterwards from eye witness reports). But it wasn't really registering.

And so I started to get worried. There's still quite a bit of great and exciting music still to come and I didn't want to feel like this for the rest of it. Luckily, the one two punch of White Rainbow and Evolutionary Jass Band came along and sorted me right out.

White Rainbow is part of the Jackie O' Motherfucker family of bands. A duo, they started with a low rumble of synth and mic-looped noise, eventually adding percussive clicks and thwacks, near-static effected guitar and singing, and assorted other mysterious sounds and noises. It's the kind of music where at first glance it feels like all one sound, but gradually, as you listen deeper and get sucked in, you start to hear all little bits of melody and rhythm emerging, you start to hear what the players are hearing.

This immersive experience was just what I needed. It cleared my head.

After the rejuventating White Rainbow set, Evolutionary Jass Band was pretty much the fathest distant extreme possible. Where White Rainbow made totally free music out of what are normally pop instruments, EJB took an approximately free jazz format and made it totally spellbinding and catchy.

This is what I love about pdxpop, seeing such radically different music all in the same place and thinking of it all as pop. Seeing a team of teenagers run over to the merch booth to buy EJB's record just does my heart good.