When I first moved to Portland the only electronic shows being organized were by this dude David Chandler that I met when he would come into the record store, either to buy weird records or drop off strange handbills. The monthly event was called Frequency and I would sometimes run into David at 2am at Kinko’s, and he’d be assembling these crazy flyers, but not just regular flyers. They started as all hexagonal and hand screened with like house paint or metallic, but then they started getting 3-dimensional! There was one that was folded into a pyramid that was really cool. For the final Frequency show he screened on recycled CD-Roms.
These were the first Portland shows I would go to and see people performing with hardware, maybe a couple DJs spinning weird electro stuff, but these were pre-laptop days mind you. Now that I think of it this is the first place I saw DJ Brokenwindow spin, but also people like Brian Foote playing with a full desktop computer, or Solenoid jamming on some midi gear, or a bunch of dudes forming a midi-drum circle. Basically, David Chandler was the guy building a little scene before there was any sort of “outsider electronic music” genre invented and getting all of us nerds out of the house. Not only that but he had this own special flyer approach.
So of course, it was David that had the idea to draw up this pop-up handbill for this show we’re doing together next month. In true Community Library fashion it involves not just DJing or hardware, but mixing both in a way that breaks down the idea genre and what beats are yours and what beats are records.
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Fiasco-tronix
Thursday Oct.12, 2006, 9pm
at Ground Kontrol (PDX)
DJ Broken Window & E*Rock
Fuck yes. I love David’s elaborate flyers. I blogged one here – http://www.urbanhonking.com/trmw/archives/2005/09/best_flyer_ever.html
I remember walking up to the counter at Ozone when I still a wee IDM nerd in college and asking someone (you?) if there were any cool “electronic” nights and that person saying Frequency. Also David bought me a science fair electronic kit as part of a free class I was taking on diy synthesizers. I win the nerd award!
Nerd Award! I liked his Oregon-shaped flyer for the last Fiasco-tronix night too.
Man, Solenoid was a part of my high school life in South Carolina, because he was on some synth email list I was on or something. I totally freaked when I found out he lived here.
Someone told me about the post…thanks guys!
Kind of depressing that I appear to be doing the same thing years later, come to think of it.
I forgot that I gave Matt a science fair electronics kit, wow that was a long time ago!
We added Philip Sherburne to the roster for Fiasco, btw. He is a pdx native who’s been travelling around writing for The Wire, Pitchfork, Earplug, etc etc about electronic dance music. He’s a cascadian ruffneck, tho.
Yeah, I’m glad I’m not still doing the same thing… I was making Smurf dude sculptures in plaster ten years ago and now I’ve advanced to the point of drawing Smurfs with Sharpie.
for real, did you do sculptures?
plaster is so not-smurf like tho’
aren’t they soft like their contemporaries, the early gummy bear candy, right?
i’m so 80’s i forgot what happened
I’ll have to show it to you some time, but I made this Smurf-dude who had a Smurf body with a human head, with beard. I didn’t have gummy technology at time, otherwise I would have used it!