Hypnotica
60: A nat HEMA, Larold Will, Office Products, Zone Wire, Nickel
Jasmine Tree
401 SW
Harrison St., 223-7956
9 pm Friday,
Dec. 8
$5
Boring says of
Hypnotica's tech-headed crowd, "About a third of the audience
is usually people who play electronic music, so it's kind
of like the meeting of the nerds."
A nat HEMA have
played shows under various other names, including HemaNike,
Tonic Youth and Albino Cheesebrain.
Count down from five. When you reach one, you will fall
into a trance, traveling back in time:
5... 4... 3... 2... 1...
You are sitting in a dusky room. Faces surround you, veiled
in a hesitant light. A man, or group of men, sits on a stage,
typing a rhythm on half-hidden machines, or picking intently
at a guitar, or shuffling a two-step behind a set of spinning
turntables. Now you hear music: looping space noise, loping
drum beats, long stretches of mechanical ambience and machine
sounds. You think, This is electronica...but this ain't
no disco.
No, it's just another typical Hypnotica, a place where
electronic beatmusik ditches the whistles-and-whoops of
rave in favor of a more elastic, experimental vibe. Through
the '90s, the mostly monthly Hypnotica series staked a bold
claim for innovation and, sometimes, just plain weirdness.
In many ways, its championing of electronic tinkering presaged
Portland's current strong experimental scene, even as it
helped usher it in. Now, though, the 5-year-old series comes
to an end with a final show at the Jasmine Tree, a suitably
surreal tiki bar near Portland State.
James Boring, the mild-mannered leader of Portland's Third
Pyramid experimental music collective--which has promoted
Hypnotican oddity around town for the past half decade--says
with quiet pride, "We've proved to an extent that people
are willing to sit down and listen to [electronica] as music,
rather than 'I've got to dance to this, this is dance music.'"
Infuriating? To some, especially those who believe techno's
sole raison d'être is to get one's backfield in motion.
Hypnotica specializes in what some disparagingly dismiss
as "armchair techno": Muzak for the intellectual masses
who'd rather read a book than scam babes at the club.
But while Hypnotica--and its sibling event series, Aural
Fixation--showcases the brainy side of electronic culture,
it's also received its fair share of criticism from the
avant-garde gatekeepers, who turn their elite noses up at
drum machines and MIDI loops.
"I've had people send me emails saying, 'It's not experimental
enough. What's this jungle? blah blah blah...'" says Boring.
"I personally see experimental as something more than just
a rock band making noise. But I think that's a lot easier
for people to swallow than someone up there with nothing
that looks anything like an instrument."
Boring does admit that, at some Hypnoticas, "you'll see
a guy with just a PC onstage and it'll look like he's chatting
online." A desire to avoid this mind-numbing visual aesthetic
led Boring's own band, A nat HEMA, to develop more performance
personalities than Sybil. Past shows have seen A.n.H. do
everything from Casio-plonking cabaret pop to "hardcore
noise-dirge with drum machine and vocals" ("to upset the
people at the Dada Ball") and pure feedback screech.
Such bizarre outgrowths parallel the development of Third
Pyramid and the Hypnotica series themselves. All, it turns
out, are the result of happy accidents.
"I didn't even really plan to get involved with shows,"
Boring insists. "We just needed a gig. We were doing ambient
noise at the time, and there was nowhere to play. We went
through the whole Satyricon cabaret thing, and after a while
it was like, 'Not one more Sunday night in a smoky bar with
10 people there....' [When] I realized we were gonna do
a monthly show, I wanted to give it a name. So then I'm
like, if it has a name, we have to say, 'So-and-so presents
this.' So I pretty much had to pull it all out of my ass
pretty fast just to make the poster."
Now, five years later, the hastily conceived Third Pyramid
has outlasted several of its venues (Umbra Penumbra, Thee
O Hell Cafe, Kow Theater). Friday's Hypnotica, however,
is number 60--a nice round number which seemed to indicate
a good ending point, an appropriate time for Boring to disconnect
himself from the promotional machinery.
"I'm not too worried about not doing shows anymore, because
there are so many people doing stuff," he says, namechecking
recent events by theater groups (Liminal), underground film
and video crews (Peripheral Produce, Charm Bracelet), multimedia
art collectives (2 Gyrlz) and inspired individuals (Doug
Theriault) that have embraced some of the same transgenre
experimental bands once booked by Third Pyramid.
And Boring claims he's not going anywhere, only stepping
back from his promoter's role: "I'm perfectly happy with
Portland, and I think I'm gonna stay here a long time. But
we definitely need someone to get some guts and open a cool
club. The clubs that have opened which seemed to be dedicated
to electronic music seem to be much more dedicated to the
bottom line. I also wish people wouldn't be so factionalized.
Someone will want to put on a show but they'll only invite
their friends to play. I think it's more interesting to
see scenes of people overlap."
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