Animal Collective, Flying Lotus - Hollywood Bowl - 9/23/12

Timothy Norris

Animal Collective & Flying Lotus
Hollywood Bowl
9-23-12

Better than... shrooming while watching the Emmys.

See also:
*The Time Flying Lotus Pretended To Be A UCLA Physics Major
*Flying Lotus - Coachella - 4-14-12

The Hollywood Bowl is not the venue for working out new shit, that is if you don't count Herbie Hancock's unfortunate ode to peace last month. Barry Manilow did not show up on the Fourth of July looking to test out new material. Anita Baker hit quick and frequent with her radio jams. Nonetheless, last night's bill at Hollywood Bowl's World Festival dealt largely in the unfamiliar, for better and worse.

The night opened with Huun Huur Tu, a Siberian throat singing quartet that would make any man with an Ethnomusicology degree feel socially relevant (Class of 2003!). The group dug deep into the overtone hums of the genre, creating an amazing blend of low and high that is unlike any other genre. Their traditional set was weirdly divided by producer Carmen Rizzo, who provided electronic, sand-swept sounds, reminiscent of a Sting album. Thankfully Rizzo was only up briefly before allowing the quartet to close out their set with an archaic precursor to the electronic sounds: drones, overtones and swagger.

Timothy Norris

Hometown hero Flying Lotus surfaced shortly thereafter. Has any performer on the Hollywood Bowl stage tried so hard to be anonymous? Lotus presented a set of mostly new material from behind a projection screen, rarely saying anything throughout his set. Granted that projection screen, run by the incomparable Strangeloop, was immensely engaging: Swirling around a table-bound Lotus, the projections took on the power of an Iron Man suit, taking his otherwise stationary body through a maze of effects. A cage was built around him, shit got 3-D for a minute, and it otherwise resembled the best laser light show you've ever seen.

The bass-rattling sounds he was generating, meanwhile, were from another world. There were very few samples that could be effectively Shazamed; bleeps and bloops fuzzed through the bowels of the crowd as a steady bass kept the beat but it all emanated from his two hands, whether through laptop, sampler or whatever else lay before him. Nonetheless, the combination of sights and sounds had most of the crowd pretty satisfied and it wasn't even 8:30.

"Where my grandma at?" he asked at one point. When he dug into a sample of the Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic" that the crowd rose to their feet; they also recognized "Mercy," but it was his new songs from his upcoming album Until the Quiet Comes -- look for our feature profile of him in the Weekly next week -- that really had folks shitting their pantaloons.

Animal Collective review below