Monday, June 9, 2008

Meat Beat Manifesto/Badawi

LIVE
Orlando, FL


In the darkness....We all live in the darkness according to Meat Beat Manifesto anyway. But I get ahead of myself one clear night; the doc took a drive down to Orlando because he heard that Meat Beat Manifesto was throwing down at The Social. Having seen there mind blowing show a few years ago in Jax I was excited to check out the new material and see what they added to there visual mayhem. What I didn't realize was that Badawi, the opening act was going to rein sonic dub destruction down upon all that were there. I did a little reading up on this composer/dub freak, but you really had to be there to witness the bass rumbling in your gut. This wasn't your grandmother’s dubstep either; Badawi was droppin' three am pounding dub beats just as hard as any techno dj. With a brief respite we went and checked out the t-shirt booth and the girl running it was dating Mark Pistel (the funky drummer on a lot of MBM tracks). I was tickled pink by the whole encounter but it didn't stop there. When Jack took the stage he out came punching, with the latest tracks off his new album Autoimmune. This hip-hop dubtastic electronic jam had us all enthralled as we watched Jack Dangers and crew weave a tale of a society taken over by the television, ruled by fear of the president and controlled by the powers that be. For 10+ years MBM has been an experimentalist dub act, influenced by the hip hop sounds of San Francisco there is less anger and more of a stoned realization of what we are doing to the world or what the world is doing to us. Gone are the industrial strength pop tunes replaced by the smell of "marijuana smoke" as images of self destruction and sampling mayhem ask us to question our reality. Of course he could not help but play a few favorites stating the "consequences" of "past present and future are up to you" driving the nail home that the revolution starts here. Just press play.

- Dr. Strangelove

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