Live Tonight at Knitting Factory (New York): The Hyperspace Rock Sound of Blind Idiot God

by Ari Abramowitz
21 July 2006

Some shows make an impact on you because of the personal significance of the event. PINK FLOYD was my first concert. The Momentary Lapse of Reason “reunion” tour, 1987—Brendan Byrne Arena. It was my first concert and, therefore, an important life event and still ranks as one of my favorite music-related experiences.

Other shows throw you into a new world of sensation.
Take CRASH WORSHIP, at any number of venues, with its atavistic cauldron of wine, milk, fruit, nudity, and drums, all contributing to an intensely involving live experience.

Finally, there are shows that are so musically overwhelming that they temporarily alter your sense of perception. BLIND IDIOT GOD (BIG) at CBGB, around 1994/95 generated this monumental feeling—it was simply awesome, in the classic sense.

The first thing that anyone in the room would have noticed was the wall-to-wall spread of futuristic, state-of-the-art-looking, five-foot tall speakers. Who the hell uses that much amplification? Why? And what are they possibly going to do with it? Next, your eyes went to the front and center of the stage where there stood the biggest drum set I have ever seen at a New York club show. This massive, double-bass edifice with maybe five rack toms, three floor toms, and innumerable cymbals would have been perfectly at home on stage with DAVE LOMBARDO or even JOURNEY, if you added a orchestral gong behind the kit. Who the hell plays on a kit like that? In CB’s? Why? And what is he possibly going to do with it?

The short answer to the above questions is that Blind Idiot God made me feel what it might be like to fly in the Millennium Falcon while inside one of its engines… and enjoy it. And I don’t mean it in the masochistic “can you take the pain” or “how extreeeme can you go” senses. I mean that this was the most supersonic, levitationally massive (the band’s guitarist, ANDY HAWKINS prefers to call it “symphonically loud”), monolithically hyperspace musical performance I have ever heard.

BIG are playing a rare show tonight (July 21st) at the Knitting Factory in New York, with DON CABALLERO. The opportunity to feel this music should not be missed.

The band’s sound is entirely instrumental and is based around harmonically complex guitar chording and throttling drumming (though the band also incongruously plays dub). Hawkins’s guitar sounds as though he has amassed several legions of guitarists, each playing its own esoteric chord on top of each other at such speeds that it isn’t clear where one chord ends and another begins. It’s as if he has condensed all of GLENN BRANCA’s guitar symphonies into one person and one guitar.

Yet BIG’s best stuff hits harder than any Branca piece. That’s where drummer TED EPSTEIN comes in. Simply put, you’d have to look far and wide to find a drummer that is doing so much and doing it with so much power and invention. Usually, the most athletic drummers (Lombardo, MICK HARRIS) sacrifice some composition for their power or even lighten-up as they speed-up while inventive, finesse drummers (BILL BRUFORD) often sacrifice some wallop for their niftiness. Epstein doesn’t fall prey to either. He is constantly putting all sorts of cymbals in all sorts of unusual places, adding brilliant shading and tone to what he’s playing at any speed, even when he’s pummeling his huge set into utter oblivion.

It’s when the two coordinate that BIG pulls off its most interesting trademark: the sudden acceleration/deceleration effect. Hawkins somehow bends his chords (or does he play with his volume
knob?) in such a way that sounds like his guitar’s batteries are running low, while Epstein and bass player, GABE KATZ, suddenly drop into a woozy, slow tempo to simulate the feeling of winding down, only to have Hawkins quickly strum some tight, high chords as the rhythm section follows with thrash bursts to bring everything from 15-150mph in one second. This is the Millennium Falcon ‘hyperspace’ effect I was talking about, though I could see how someone could also interpret it as whiplash.

Check out the obliterating “Thunderhead” and “747” off of their Cyclotron album and the especially whiplash-inducing “Rollercoaster” from Undertow to hear the band doing what it does best.

But hyperspace does a better job of describing the physical exhilaration that this music can induce: the feeling of being compressed and expanded at the same time, of being sucked into a black hole and shot out into the infinite at the same time.

Did I mention that the band also plays dub?

This is, I think, Blind Idiot God’s first concert in New York in around a decade. Word has it that they may even have a new release coming out later this year. Either way, just go—Go! And make sure you’re strapped in tight.

Filed under concerts prog