Add N to (X)
w/ Plastiq Phantom, Marumarie
Tues July 24 at Graceland, $10.
“‘Mongoloid’ by Devo describes me best,” Add N to (X)’s theremin player, Ann Shenton, told a perplexed NME journalist in 1999. “It’s self-explanatory. Everyone says I look like one in the morning.” The band is a bizarre, retro-futurist’s delight. (The name comes from a computer command that creates an unknown electronic third force.)
Last year’s Add Insult to Injury album fairly whizzed along with its old-school WASP synthesizers and mischievous Moogs, a real-time demonic beat added courtesy of Th’ Faith Healers drummer Joe Dilworth. It sounded like Kraftwerk minus the geek glasses, Photek with an enhanced sense of humor–or, for you Northwest souls, Seattle’s IQU, only more so. Tracks like “Monster Bobby” and “Brothel Charge” rampaged like a bevy of bruisers let loose in an Art of Noise hair salon. If nothing else, Shenton and fellow conspirator Richard Claydon (with his Korg Micro-Preset) proved that geeks can be great.
“Heaven is having with an octopus,” Shenton went on to explain to the NME journalist. “Can you imagine? They’ve just discovered octopuses have a sense of humor and that they like to play. They might be quite, erm, multidextrous. I could have eights!”
Think that’s strange? Third member Barry 7 played at a customized “synth duel” at London’s Victoria & Albert museum last year. Also, Jon Spencer contributes to “Wax Gravy” from the recent “Poker Roll” single, and he sounds okay! Now that is weird. (Also, the band has attained a degree of notoriety for a couple of its “pornographic” robot sex videos.)
In the near future, the London trio aims to investigate the fusion between the biological and the synthetic, with the erection of a Buckminster Fuller-inspired dome in a Bourges gallery. It will act as a mobile propaganda post, and will contain a theremin operated by a number of finches that will unconsciously produce sounds that will be amplified and recorded each day and catalogued for the duration of the show.
Come on in and pull up a pink or blue one. The wave modulation’s just fine.