Data Breaker

Now in its sixth year, the Laptop Battle has become a
high-adrenaline highlight of the electronic-music calendar. In 2003,
Zach “Zapan” Huntting and Kris Moon humbly launched LB in
Seattle’s Deep Down Lounge, but it has spread its cables into clubs
across North America and in the UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, and New
Zealand.

This Friday, 16 combatants from
Seattle, Portland, and
Vancouver will go through three-minute elimination rounds of
maximal compositional skill-flexing. Judges will evaluate each track
for song development, emotional impact, performance, and crowd
response. Contestants are permitted a laptop, sound card, and
controller. This year’s lineup includes Squid Leader, KFO, Andrew
Luck, and Tron Sister (two-time champ Moon will also
perform).

“In many ways, the event has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,”
Moon says. “It’s spread [worldwide], and I don’t think either one of us
saw that coming! The fact that we are throwing our sixth event with 16
contestants in Seattle says a lot about the event, in that the local
producers have faith in what we’re doing.”

“Kris and I have been working hard to grow the LB phenomenon
organically over the last five years,” Huntting states. “The next step
would be to get some bigger sponsorships or a capital infusion that
would allow us to expand our marketing and distribution efforts.”

Another factor that enhances the LB experience is the diversity of
styles participants display. “We like to set it up so that hiphop
goes head-to-head with electro, techno goes against drum ‘n’ bass, and
IDM fights with industrial music,” Huntting asserts. “We like our
crowds as diverse as possible. That way, everybody has at least a few
new, interesting experiences, and everybody gets to hear and cheer for
their favorite genre.”

“At first, I think the Laptop Battle favored harder, faster,
glitchier stuff, but there’s always been competitors who have
approached it differently, on a more song-oriented tip or with a unique
performance,” Moon says.

It hasn’t been all smooth beat-matching for the LB, however.
Huntting recalls a farcical event at San Francisco’s Milk Bar in 2004.
“Contestants’ sound was only coming out of one channel, and we
periodically lost sound altogether. I was MCing that night, and the
audience was glaring at me as if I had stolen one of their children. It
was a hostile and unfriendly crowd, to say the least. In the end, I was
so flustered that I accidentally gave the winner’s sponsorship package
to the runner-up, and I had to fight with him and his manager—who
had been giving me the finger from the sidelines the entire
night—in order to get it back to the right person.”

“If we had made a movie of that night, we would be rich!” Moon says.

Laptop Battle, Fri Oct 10, Nectar,
9 pm, $10, 21+. More info
at www.laptopbattle.com and www.myspace.com/laptopbattles”.