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Listings are
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next is the support band(s),
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Friday December 10
2021  8:30PM doors -- music at 9:00PM ••• ALL AGES $15 or $20 or $25 in advance / $25 at the door DJ Dials presents... Sad Night Dynamite www.sadnightdynamite.com/ Alternative/Indie MOPHONO mophono.com/ experimental electronic dance Brogan Bentley www Dance/Electronic Sad Night Dynamite -from Glastonbury, UK -Here’s what we know about Sad Night Dynamite. They make dark, deranged electronic pop songs about demonic sailors and talking birds: a musical dream-world teetering on the brink of nightmarishness. They are, also, a duo –first glimpsed brawling in the back of a stretch limo as it worksits way through the Czech countryside, in the surreal, funereal short film that accompanied their experimental debut EP, ‘SND 001’. It’s an immersive entry-point to the Sad Night Dynamite universe, and the charged, brother-like childhood friendship between Archie and Josh underpinning it all. What matters, these young producers/vocalists insist, isn’t whether everything makes sense right away; but that in a world turned upside down, the fact that there is still a wonderland to get lost in. “We love artists who build something bigger than themselves: worlds to explore and be lived in,” says Josh. The result is a sound as explosive and evocative as the Sad Night Dynamite name implies, markingthe arrival of the UK’s most exciting new band. Barely in their twenties, Sad Night Dynamite draw together a complex mix of sounds and storytelling. It’s a place where dubby bass tremors, eerie synths and guitars intertwine with riddlesome, near-rapped lyrics exploring the fantastical and the frightening. “We’ve always been interested in light and shade: putting violence and beauty next to each other,” says Archie of the philosophy behind their genre-colliding sound. In Sad Night Dynamite’s early material, you’re as likely to hear a lifelong love of hip-hop meld with classic British bands like The Specials as you are a pair just as enamoured by fellow-crate-diggers like The Avalanches as they are the classic cinema scores of Tarantino. All have informed Archie and Josh’s unique way with modern pop, and a project in which piercing home truths can be found somewhere in-between the sublime and the ridiculous. The pair live together in east London now, but first sewed the seeds for Sad Night Dynamite at school. Archie and Josh were raised a stone’s throw from Glastonbury, only recognising later how formative (and slightly feral) it was for tracks like ‘Icy Violence’ to grow up in nature. “It’s like another dimension,” says Josh. “You pass small villages miles apart and none of them have much infrastructure beyond a post office. If you need food, you have to travel to super-stores that sit in the bigger towns like cruise ships. In London, you kind of only know you’re part of the natural world when it suddenly rains.” It’s an outsider-status Sad Night Dynamite quickly turned to their advantage, beginning to write music for the band whilst separated during university; cue “tonnes of Facebook messages” and Logic files bounced back and forth over email. Having collaborated most of their lives, Archie and Josh’s distance arguably gave them the clarity to plot a project with “no formula, no time limits, no genre. We wrote a couple of songs and knew we were onto something good, so we just kept on writing.”Sad Night Dynamite’s eurka-moment proved tobe their first single, ‘Icy Violence’ -a sprawling, ambitious and unpredictable tale that’s as stark a statement of intent as it is (crucially) the sound of two young guys fucking about, and striking gold. “We wrote ‘Icy Violence’ at the end of a really good summer,” they recall. “It has a beach theme and a kidnapping, but the end part really reminds us of home, of green, of Glastonbury.” ‘Icy Violence’ was also the blueprint for Sad Night Dynamite on how they could use fantasy to explore much darker stories. “Coming up with the characters was really freeing. As ordinary people it’s quite easy to pigeonhole yourself writing about everyday experiences, but now we can do and say whatever we wanted without limits.” Once they’d found the formula, Sad Night Dynamite’s determination to keep on breaking it is evident across their first mixtape. Tracks like ‘Chokehold’ find the middle-ground between the atmospherics of UK rap, world-building pop like Gorillaz, and old-school Dr. Dre: sometimes gnarly, at other times hazy, but all shot through with playful experimentation. ‘Krunk’, meanwhile, thinks nothing of leaping from creepy mandolinnoises into a G-funk groove, over which the pair trade raps about objectification from the perspective of a druggy sea captain.“We go into some grey areas lyrically,” admits Josh. “If something is deliberately shallow or horrible, exploring that through the other side can be really powerful.” It’s eclectic and disruptive, but then that’s Sad Night Dynamite through and through. What else would you expect from a band obsessed with doing something “psychedelic and weird,” as Archie puts it?You sense that Sad Night Dynamite are at the start of a greateradventure to come, though they set the bar high for themselves in the chaotic trip abroadto shoot a visual for their largely-instrumental EP,‘SND 001’. “We wanted the filmand that project as a wholeto almost act as a preface to us as a band,” theboys explain. “The narrative is open-ended, but hints at a larger story to come. Each video is deliberately vague, but that comes back to us wanting to play with perception.” Indeed, the fact very few of the Czech locals spoke English but still connected with it drills into the longer-term ambitions of a band like Sad Night Dynamite. “I think they identified with the project’s tone –there’s darkness and some disillusionment in there but also -we hope -a lot of humour. The goal is ultimately to bring our weird stories to as many people as possible.” Their fantastical, frightening musical dream world is already expanding. Stand back and watch Sad Night Dynamite blow up. MOPHONO -from the Bay Area, CA -Mophono, who set out to master the machines that threatened to be the masters of men, at an early age showed a strong passion for science, math & music. He was to be an inventor/engineer, but music had the greater gravitational pull. While electronic & sample based music matured in the nineties, so did Mophono’s career as the most successful experimental electronic dance music DJ in the bay area. Booked at many of the underground raves until April of 1998 when one Oakland warehouse dance floor collapsed during one of his epic DJ sets, ending an era and starting a new one. DJ Centipede aka Mophono then focused his attention on the growing bay area beat scene, perfected his production & beat juggling skills while promoting San Francisco’s most forward thinking events. Since then Mophono has released two full length albums & a slew of singles giving birth to two new genre’s Thug Jazz & Dirt Wave & a new standard in the record industry called Skip on Beat. Inspired by 60’s psyche & experimental electronic music, Mophono Is known for his destructive drum breaks & heavy & orchestral instrumental compositions. With his legendary “Change the Beat” party in San Francisco, Performing live on Boiler Room with long time partner Gaslamp Killer & sharing the stage with DJ Shadow, Flying Lotus, Amon Tobin, Edan, DJ Food, DJ Krush, Dabrye, Diplo & De La Soul with his Skip on Beat records, drum machines & moogs, Mophono intends to set a new standard in live electronic music performance. Brogan Bentley -from Oakland, CA -Diapason Rex is the second LP by Oakland-based producer Brogan Bentley on Leaving Records. Picking up right where Bentley’s 2014 LP The Snake left off, Diapason Rex’s songs evoke the geography and spiritual energy of the west coast while showcasing the producer’s growing confidence in both carefully crafted dance productions and expansive sonic arrangements. Bentley states, “It’s been brewing for a long, long time and it holds so much information. This is the crowning burst of harmonious song for me, my opus, my cosmic regal song.” Haunting, swelling album-opener “Ecstasy” sets the record’s tone, where a bed of meditative pads are confronted by a driving breakbeat, heavy layers of soulful vocals and hard-edged synths. Almost defying categorization, the sound of Diapason Rex is bracingly personal. Bentley states, “I’m so particular in so many aspects, and I’m so certain of what I want things to sound like, that I’ll go after it with everything I’ve got. Between the two places of pure experimentation and total intention, is where this album was born from… I really feel like every single song is a crystal.” Club-ready tracks like the stuttering, sample-slicing “Work” and the elegant yet pained “Phantom” highlight Diapason Rex’s production value. Bentley’s attention to sonic detail is deep-seated; according to the producer, “For me, music is my teacher, and specifically bass.… This stuff is really supposed to acclimate the energy centers in your body. |
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