Live in L.A.: Sean Carnage Celebrates Three Years of Monday Nights

By LA Weekly Tue., Aug. 5 2008 at 1:03 PM

Categories: Live in L.A.

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Sean Carnage Monday Nights Celebrates Three Years of Total Weirdness
Text and photos by Liz Ohanesian

Sean Carnage Monday Nights at Pehrspace is the sort of party where a guy who has nothing to do with any of the performances will show up in a leopard print body suit and few people turn to look. It’s the sort of club where the best of the underground will collide with the worst of the mainstream to form some chaotic picture of this very moment in Los Angeles. And so, for the DIY club’s third anniversary, promoter Carnage, resident DJ Kyle H. Mabson, and friends kept the chaos oh-so-slightly controlled with seven bands linked together by Mabson and Health’s Jupiter Keyes dance floor selections.

Winners

Performances were short, maybe twenty minutes per band, and heavy on the energy. BIRTH!’s opening set resulted in the artist being body slammed by a few friends before he dove under the legs of an unsuspecting onlooker. The Amazements, a fairly regular feature at Monday Nights whose sound falls between early hardcore and a ruckus, sustained a healthy moshpit for the duration of its set. Winners doused the crowd with soapy bubbles while mixing Macarena dance moves with slightly raunchy electro punk. And I.E., whose raver hip-hop is clearly a favorite of Monday Nights’ regulars, closed with the bulk of the audience joining in her rhymes. Interspersed throughout the night were noise collaborations and drum-and-keyboard experimentations.

Jupiter Keyes and Kyle H. Mabson

It isn’t the stylistic mish-mash of live performances, nor is the outrageous outfits peppering the crowd, that makes Monday Nights the weirdest club in town. It’s the DJ sets.

Mabson and Keyes’ iPod picks for the evening focused on some of the worst dance floor atrocities to be committed to record back in the 1990s. Think of a time when glaringly overproduced beats were highlighted by the juxtaposition of diva house vocals and a half-rap performed in a sleazy, generically European-accented growl. Then imagine fifty or so people crammed onto an art gallery dance floor, virtually dry-humping each other to the sound of a high school dance that they were too young to be forced into attending. It wasn’t irony, dear reader. Irony would involved giggling to a friend before busting out a few intentionally awful emo breakdancing moves. Instead, the people who are creating the most commercially inaccessible music of this moment are also coming out as diehard fans of pop-dance tunes that had long since disappeared from nightclubs and top 40 radio. Chances are, this may be what influences the L.A. underground over the next year. Go figure.

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