Gordon Voidwell, Das Racist, Boy Crisis, Iron Solomon @ 92y Tribeca 4/24/10

This past Saturday, the 92y Tribeca hosted Gordon Voidwell’s first record release show. After a strong mixtape, a string of well-received remixes, the debut of a clothing line, and an upcoming appearance in a sci-fi webisode, we finally get the first piece of Gordon Voidwell with a degree of permanency. May 18th, Cantora Records is set to release Ivy League Circus on 12”. So a party is the perfect way to celebrate.

It’s fitting as this song has been around for a while, featured on the excellent Voided Checks / The Void mixtape which was released last year, and also has life as a video. Though it’s not as up-tempo dance as other songs they’ve done, not having the energy of “BREAD” or “Disco Afternoon” and not as lyrically confrontational as “WhiteFriends.” “Ivy League Circus” still shows off the vocal interplay, synthfunk and clever lyrical content found in Gordon Voidwell mixtape.

For this show, Gordon Voidwell called out the full Fam. Opening acts, Iron Solomon, Boy Crisis, Das Racist and a rotating host of DJs to play between sets.

How was it? It was the absolute best Gordon Voidwell show I’d ever seen and close to being tops for great shows so far this year.

I’d seen a handful of shows at 92y Tribeca, and the main auditorium seems fine for comedy but the acoustics of the room are really odd for music. If you stand near the back, there’s a horrible delay and some instruments get lost, but if you stand right up front, you get great everything. We stood up front to shoot the show, but a friend who was just a bit back complained about the sound mix repeatedly through the night.

The first act was Iron Solomon, a battle rapper who displayed great lyrical dexterity and wit as lines twisted and turned to end with near perfect stings. He did an a cappella ode to growing up where he named his crew by name where cheers went up by those members in attendance. He did what’s becoming a genre to itself bemoaning the fate of hip hop and the direction thereof in a song called “Bling Bitches and Beef” which is about image rather than content and the need to focus on women as property, fake outrage and violence, and conspicuous consumerism taken to parody. I’m sympathetic, but then he finished his set with a “different kind of love song” called “Shawty with a Shotty” which was about two of the things he just lamented.

I was unable to find any info on when Iron Solomon’s release is coming out, but to get a taste, he has several battle raps up on his MySpace page. There’s nothing new in how he is getting to his destination, but the lyrical journeys are so enjoyable that you won’t really mind.

Boy Crisis is a band that was supposed to conquer the world, but seems to have gotten stuck trying to get their pants on and missed their own hype train. They make 1980s synthpop but with the hard to balance sweeping melancholy and dry humor of the best Pet Shop Boys songs. Watching it live was a bit difficult to form an opinion as Victor Vasquez appeared to get bored singing these songs yet again spending the latter half of the set goofing off, turning in a performance which was only tangentially connected to the music. A shame because the music was just so great.

As someone seeing Boy Crisis live for the first time, I was invested in hope for how the set would come out; hoping for a great performance but in retrospect I feel that I really should have known better. This creation of calculated anarchy on stage did not really detract so much from the music, but unfortunately I didn’t feel that it added anything to the performance itself. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy myself. There is always a bit of juvenile glee in watching people absolutely refuse to behave themselves.

Before Gordon Voidwell took to the stage, a very miniature fashion show took place, as the back up dancers came out wearing some of the Gordon Voidwell pieces for Apliiq. A hooded sweatshirt and t-shirt, each of which had triangles of what looked like sample fabric sewn on to the main pieces. It didn’t quite meet expectations of what I’d hoped when I first heard they were being made, but a quick peek at apliiq.com shows this is totally in line with what they make. I hope that we can have something a bit more in line with what’s worn on stage, as each performance has consisted of a coordinated uniform that is usually visually striking.

Then we were “treated” to a trailer for a “sci-fi” webisode which consisted of 90% Gordon Voidwell performance shot like a horrible amateur music video, 5% woman dancing and 5% incomprehensible dialogue. It looked like the main selling point of the show was Gordon Voidwell rather than being inserted into an established story. The trailer failed to communicated why Gordon Voidwell was in this at all. For the fetishism the band was afforded, it looked like it could have easily been any other band at all. The company was something difficult to spell, and a quick Google search doesn’t immediately reveal the trailer online.

Not that any of this matters. When Gordon Voidwell finally took the stage, concerns about things like branding and over extension vanished and what’s really important came forward. The music. The performance. The elements that got them to this point.

Musically, Gordon Voidwell is very much like the synthfunk 80s, acting as a kind of counterpart to Brooklyn’s excess of synthpop reenactment. While many bands like the aforementioned Boy Crisis seem to revisit the sounds they grew up on, presenting them back to an audience eager for musical nostalgia, Gordon Voidwell does the same thing, yet as the antecedents are different the music is very similar.

Much of the lyrical content of Gordon Voidwell is about reaching striving to succeed in a world of white privilege, and how life is the same regardless of how successful you are at navigating the many societal traps that have been placed to prevent that success. Yet the overall message, at least on what was provided on the mixtape, was that we’re all the same, and it’s better that we work together rather than get bogged down in personal squabbles. It presents a dream for society that is quasi-utopian, yet not entirely unobtainable. But that’s not to say that this even matters when you’re dancing your ass off.

And if you’re inclined to dance, then a Gordon Voidwell performance is the perfect conduit. Building each set to be a series of peaks and valleys, they pull from a diverse collection of songs to provide ample opportunity to sweat interlaced with songs that allow you to catch your breath.

For this performance, Gordon Voidwell pulled out a lot of his crowd pleasers and then some, when they were joined on stage by two thirds of Das Racist. Victor Vasquez and Himanshu Suri were on hand to provide lyrics to the Gordon Voidwell remix of “Shorty Said” and a few other songs from their own recent mixtape turning the concert into a jam session as Guillermo E. Brown put down his zenphone and picked up a microphone and provided patois backing as Kassa Overalls’ jazz drummer skills shifted and morphed the lines fluidly as tempo and style shifted from Tecla’s keyboard cues.

The entire set, everyone was in perfect sync with one another, but more importantly, everyone was in harmony. Not musical harmony, but familial harmony. The immediate commitment to the show in front of them and the joy of playing before an audience full of friends, fans and fam brought Gordon Voidwell all to the height of their power as a band.

It was the absolute best I’d ever seen them. My hope is that this is only the start. If there is a Gordon Voidwell performance near you, go see it. Cancel on everyone up to and including God to attend. He’ll understand.