Last Night: The Crystal Method Performs Surprise Live Set
View more photos in Colin Young-Wolff's "The Crystal Method Secret Show @ Echoplex" slideshow.
If electronic dance music ever gets its own This Is Spinal Tap-like parody, The Crystal Method would have to be the film's hard-partying, amplifier-past-10 inspiration. Not that there's anything wrong with that: Since the mid-1990s Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland have been injecting dance music with a rockist sense of urgency. It's just that TCM is a stadium band for the 21st century, sans the British accents, but definitely with the rock-star appetites.![]()
Colin Young-Wolff
And so it was quite a treat to see the pair performing a surprise, invite-only show early Saturday night at the Echoplex in Echo Park for a crowd of a few hundred people. The performance was part of a promotion from the Avid/Digidesign/Pro Tools software and M-Audio hardware folks, who help make electronic dance music possible on the back end. While you're more likely to see an act like TCM dishing out its latest work (Divided By Night) via turntables because it's simply more cost-effective, the Echoplex crowd was treated to a full-on live experience that featured an array of digital toys.![]()
Colin Young-Wolff





