Extra Action Marching Band - Knitting Factory (New York) - Saturday, August 12, 2006

by Ari Abramowitz
18 August 2006

When talking about live shows a few weeks ago, I mentioned CRASH WORSHIP, the greatest live group I’ve ever experienced. As the rhythms of the universe would have it, a group called the EXTRA ACTION MARCHING BAND (EAMB), which includes two or three former Crash Worshippers, paraded into town on Saturday night. Far more than the concurrent SONIC YOUTH/YEAH YEAH YEAHS show in Brooklyn, this was the place where I wanted to be.

The place to be for what? For mind/body melding/obliteration, for Bacchanalian revelation, Dionysian ecstasy, and the temporary existence in a space outside the daily realm of existence. But wait, that was Crash Worship. How is EAMB? A hoot, for sure, but one that never shatters the ceiling into something more.

But the hoot was a good one: a mighty 6-person (or so) drum corps laying down the hard, funky, New Orleans, Balkan, Moroccan, BLACK SABBATH (they pulled out a few bars of “Behind the Walls of Sleep”), high school marching band beats, a 20-person (or so) horn troupe of all the horns you can think of, including plenty of tuba, and a 6-person (4 girls, 2 guys) flag/pom-pom dance ensemble, in g-strings. With ingredients like these, a good time is a foregone conclusion. Whether you hit your money shot or not is another question.

You gotta picture it: at any given time, at least half of the 30+ person group would be on the dance floor. That’s great, right? It embodies the breakdown of performer/audience barrier, organically intertwines the music with the dancing with the listening with everything. You’re in the middle of the experience, whether you planned on it or not, so start living, baby. Except not quite. The instrumentation took up so much of the Knit’s limited space (while some of the cast members physically pushed back the “audience”) that we were increasingly ‘sardined’ into each other, enabling some limited frottage perhaps, but discouraging dancing and certainly curtailing the most ecstatic “let it all go” variety. It simply wasn’t possible unless you were willing to Tasmanian Devil everyone within a two-foot radius. Even if you did succeed in multiple, co-audience decapitations, you still weren’t going to be able to dance very much unless your vorpal technique also extended to the tuba two inches in front of your face. Basically, we were still the audience; they were still the performers. The only difference from the usual was that we were getting increasingly pushed out of the way. We might have been merely the audience, but were we irrelevant, too?

And then there’s the flag crew. Six people dancing around, three or four square inches away from being totally naked. Who could complain? Not me, if their purpose was to keep the pansexual hormonal levels flowing while also providing occasional visual stimuli throughout the mayhem. Heck, with the mutated march-based choreography, the dance group sometimes even reminded me of PUBLIC ENEMY’s backup dancers.

Again, it didn’t quite work the way it should have. Firstly, the two guys in the ensemble were major perpetrators of the push-everyone-out-of-the-way-so-everyone-can-see-me mentality. After they had staked their territorial claims, they would wave their flags around so no one could get near them i.e. so no one could move and actually, you know, dance. As if we had all come to this thing in order to watch a couple of self-obsessed narcissists who clearly think their average looks and soft-ish physiques are more captivating than they actually are.

The girls in the group were inexplicably wearing moustaches. Hey, I understand that this is a supreme environment for any and all sexual identities and exploration. This is the kind of charged environment where it can all hang out or go in or do both or whatever. This is about breaking down traditional notions of sex roles and constructs. This may even be about conceptual stuff like ‘abjection’ i.e. attraction/repulsion. Great. However, you gotta also ask what percentage of the population gets turned on by the idea of girls with moustaches. Call me vanilla, but I’m guessing it ain’t a big kink group. Exhibitionism has a place in self-expression, but with the members of the dance troupe it seemed to be wielded as a cudgel of privilege that only the performers could swing. I was even told by one of the, um, members to sit down while one of the girls danced. I didn’t come for this, either.

“We’re trying to take everything to an extreme,” says drummer Angel. “It’s more of a sexploitation vibe than a sex vibe. We’re trying to be so over-the-top that it’s ridiculous. I hate it when people take us seriously.” Why sexploitation is preferable to sex is left unclear. Call me serious, but for me to get to the “extreme” requires getting out of my normal head-space and self-consciousness. The arch self-consciousness described by Angel is exactly the kind of thing that kept the EAMB show as more of a mildly diverting, publicity stunt-related piece of consumable entertainment than the riotous, boundary-busting communal experience it could be.

To be fair, these criticisms might largely be a function of the band playing in way too small of a space. With more room, the band could play however it wants, the crowd could dance however it wants and the flag guys could masturbate for the entire duration and no one would ever notice cause we’d be too busy blowing our minds and shaking our butts to the beats and doing it as crazy and nasty as we wanna be. This was only one show; the potential for something more inspiring to happen is too great to give up. I will be back, more than thrice, if necessary.

But for comparison’s sake, with Crash Worship, the poly-sexual nature of the space never had to be trumpeted in as much of a burlesque and campy way as EAMB feels the need to do. The Crash Worship sexuality was primal. The space was animalistic without having to declare itself as such. The drums did it. The motion did it. The intensity did it. The pooled, dripping sexuality of everyone in the room (which varied from show to show) did it. In short, EAMB seems to be trying too hard to exclaim their sexuality and deviance instead of actually channeling it. Maybe that’s why Crash Worship shows featured a lot more sexuality than this EAMB show did.

Of course, there was always a strong “performance” element at Crash Worship’s, such as a bloodletting ritual at one show, or a golden women carried in on a silver, fruit-baring tray at another. There would be “crowd manipulating” satyrs of entropy, carousing about with vats of wine, imbibing with and stimulating the crowd, ensuring full participation by all. But these actions were subservient to the real action—the lived experience without trying to become the experience, themselves. There’s a difference between stimulating the crowd and merely getting self-stimulation from the crowd.

At a Crash Worship, it could be said that there was no “show,” per se, because you couldn’t really see anything. The space would often be totally dark, maybe lit by a fire or a strobe light. It wasn’t a performance as much as a temporarily altered plane of existence. By contrast, the overload of EAMB’s visual showcase makes it tailor made to be gawked at, to freak out the folks in Des Moines, to be reduced to a spectacle. Maybe this has to do, at least partially, with the fact that Crash Worship was from San Diego, with strong ties to the primitivist and industrial sub-cultures, while EAMB, despite a couple of key co-members, is from the generally more theatrical San Francisco, even though they formed as a kind of opening act for Crash Worship. It’s also interesting to note that Crash Worship co-founder/drummer, Markus Wolff, is not one of those who have made the conversion.

This EAMB show came closer than any I can remember in illustrating the battle waged by certain elements of punk culture to overthrow stadium rock by replacing its ostensibly egocentric preening with communal experience. What was so frustrating was that both sides of the battle coexisted so closely to each other in polymorphously perverse body of EAMB. Everything was on the verge of breaking into full-on, visceral, communal experience. It seemed palpable and imminent, yet it never actualized, continually going banal by the narcissistic strutting of certain elements of the performance ensemble. Certain divas of the FREDDIE MERCURY level are so talented, expressive, captivating, and Olympian that their brilliance is compelling art, in and of itself, regardless of and perhaps because of their boundless egos. With such performers, you are absorbed into their super-humanity, into their godhood.

But with a group like EAMB, in which a few dozen people are subsumed into a single music, that mentality works against the goals of the art, itself: creating an all-encompassing visceral experience. With Saturday night’s performance, the question is begged: are you trying to bend and inhibit the audience in order to cater to the egos of the performers (some of whom are not playing instruments and none of whom are Freddie Mercury) or are the performers there to obliterate the collective ego altogether, turning the entire space into one of godhood? Crash Worship could achieve the latter unlike any other group I’m aware of. EAMB might be able to achieve some of the same, but it probably won’t happen until they hang up some of the ego. Then again, maybe I’m just a size queen and need a bigger space to feel it.

Filed under concerts avant-garde