Attention dance-music aficionados yearning for a warehouse party
featuring hard-as-fuck techno played on an eight-cabinet
Turbosound rig: Seattle promoter Dan Dagen feels your pain.
Therefore, he’s booked two of America’s toughest DJ/producers to
realize his ambition to host in our city artists who possess the
drawing power to lure the masses to Europe’s premier techno venues: New
York/Berlin’s Adam X (performing live) and Portland’s Bryan
Zentz (DJing).
Dagen is a diehard champion of underground electronic music (and a
bedroom DJ with excellent taste), and he’s gone to great lengths to
organize the type of show rarely thrown in Seattle due to logistical
hurdles such as noise levels, the procurement of a punishing sound
system, and an off-the-radar space—approximately 2,000 square
feet—to accommodate it all.
Explaining why he went to all this trouble to book these in-demand
artists, Dagen says, “I put [Zentz] in the short-list class of truly
big-league producers of the Northwest, the caliber that would actually
draw crowds at Tresor in Berlin. Adam X is doing this rhythmic
noise/EBM/industrial/techno sort of sound on a similar frequency to
what Pan Sonic, recent Monolake, British Murder Boys,
etc. do. [It’s] a very raw and aggressive style that somehow finds a
way to be highly infectious on a dance floor. I like the brutal, scary
techno that manages to make people dance.
“A lot of people bemoan the state of the scene,” Dagen continues,
“but have no intention of lifting a finger to do anything about it.”
He’s lifted a helluva lot more than a finger, and consequently, many
asses are gonna shake till the wee-est of hours on November 22.
Check out Dagen’s DJ mix (as Spirals) at www.thankyouforlistening.org (go to the Uninfected Techno post).
•••
For a group named after two of the most heinous drugs extant, Dutch
trio Kraak & Smaak—Wim Plug, Oscar De Jong, Mark
Kneppers (they expand to a septet live)—aren’t really a
mind-altering proposition. They made inroads in the States with their
2005 album Boogie Angst, which is much more boogiecentric than
angsty. The disc abounds with easily digestible (yet not cloyingly
so) lounge funk laced with blaxploitation-soundtrack flourishes and
big beat gestures. This year’s Plastic People contains the kind
of amiable house music and breaks cuts favored by radio jocks like
KCRW’s Jason Bentley. The single “Squeeze Me” comes off like the
Crystal Method jamming with Tom Jones; the chorus—sung by Ben
Westbeech—recalls the late-’60s hit “You’ve Made Me So Very
Happy” (made famous by Blood Sweat & Tears and Lou Rawls). It’s
slightly left of middle-of-the-road fare for casual fans of dance
music. Noted musical authority Perez Hilton described K&S as
“Amy Winehouse meets Moby.” So now you know. 
Adam X, Bryan Zentz, Mathew Anderson, Brandon Plank, and Spirals
perform Sat Nov 22, a Seattle warehouse, 854-5370,
9
pm–5 am, $15, 21+; Kraak & Smaak, Nordic Soul, and Michael
Manahan perform Wed Nov 26, Nectar, 9 pm–2 am, $10, 21+.
