Electronic musician George Clanton played Barboza Monday night. The show had been sold out for weeks, which he noted at the top of the act. He also lamented the fact that there was no fog machine—something I was secretly grateful for as all the bodies, scrunched in together underneath all the coats, put out that sweaty, damp kind of heat that makes you sticky.
Barboza is a basement (those wood walls!) and fog would only encourage mold to grow in my ears. George likes to be wet though, I think. At one point during his performance, he poured a bottle of water over his body. It made his t-shirt cling to his body, his hair stringy and hanging over his eyes. In his music video for "Dumb" he literally performs in a fountain. He's amphibious.
George is a vaporwave wunderkind. For the uninitiated, vaporwave is a genre of pop/electronic music that was an ~underground phenomenon~ in the early 2010s. Vaporwave contains elements of a type of jazz, elevator music, J-pop, and R&B mood music that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s. It's chopped 'n' screwed Muzak. There's an aesthetic quality to it as well—white granite tile, early internet graphics, empty single-level malls, Sonic the Hedgehog video game landscapes, over-branded loungewear. If you've ever seen a picture of a marble bust in floating pink room with random palm trees in the back or, like, a beautiful gif of an anime sunset on Tumblr, you've encountered vaporwave.
Though Clanton has only intermittently continued with his projects that are most associated with vaporwave (ESPRIT 空想 comes to mind) and has tried to distance himself a bit from it, his latest record, Slide is still heavily indebted to his time as a vaporwave luminary. It plays like more straightforwardly weird pop. On Monday night, though, he played a mix of oldies and "newies" as he called them. The saxophones, the stretched out and wobbly tropical synth, the reverb-y strangely pitched vocals. The fuzz, the chillness almost made my ears bleed.
Onstage, it was just him, a keyboard, and a giant wall of light bulbs. The wall acted as a screen, morphing into a color field, then a spinning globe, then text. From my 5'5" vantage point and the low stage, the screen was almost impossible to see fully. It wasn't until a friend pointed out the entire wall of light could be viewed from the perspective of people who were holding up their phones to record a video or take a picture of Clanton's antics on stage. Almost like it was meant to be viewed that way.
