crucial

77BOADRUM live and on camera

The Boredoms played with 77 drummers on 7/7/07 in DUMBO. It started at 7:07pm and lasted for 77 minutes. 8000 people RSVP'd. By 3:30 there were about 4000 people in line to get in; the park holds about 2000 but they only let in less than 1000 due to police/restrictions/toilet-ratio-regulations. I stood on the Brooklyn Bridge (at around 16 secs in the video). It was pretty stunning even up there, but we missed a lot of detail and the beat got kind of samey from our perspective.

Vice was promoting it. They never should have told anybody and they should have lied about the location. It still would have hit capacity.

Eye of the Boredoms charmingly requested that people do not take pictures but rather they should remember it with their minds. That's not going to happen in this country (and it certainly wouldn't happen in Japan).

Just before they started I decided to use my cell phone to look up the list of drummers. mobile googled "77 drummers boredoms vice" and the first result was this picture:

Which freaked me out because I thought somebody had only just blogged it from their damn cell phone. The drummer (Yoshimi P-We ?) was wearing his purple shirt and Yamantaka Eye was wearing his green shirt. It looked exactly like what I was looking at. But no, its from June 2006

Still, the guy next to me is spending most of his thinking energy trying to figure out how to get the perfect shot with the sunset. And what happens when google IS piping in the best view in the house ? How far away are we from having a better experience via digital media than we do in person ?

On 9/11 when the first tower collapsed I was not watching from up on the roof of 440 Broadway in Brooklyn. I was downstairs watching it on TV because the camera was right at the very base of the towers. And it was pretty stunning.

Where are we ? Where are we existing ? What's happening to our senses ?

I don't mind (and can't resist) the extra powers of sense and knowledge, but the loss of the stability of situation-in-the-body is really apparant. We are always somewhere else.

I spent 6 months in India meditating and doing yoga constantly and not fucking with computers. People there make eye contact and its really obvious that the (non-Hyderabad-ITT-tech-generation) Indians are acutually there in front of you having a conversation. The Europeans and Americans are always weirdly evasive, as though they are hiding something. They are : they are hiding their complexities, their issues, their emotions and thoughts and they are always presenting an odd theater of what-is-expected.

When I got back to New York it was really eerie. All of my friends seemed really distant and evasive. NOBODY made eye contact except for a second and then you can see them clearly squirming trying to figure out at what point eye contact will be broken.

In India, Tibet and Thailand its always really funny when some guy takes a hold of your hand and just holds it while talking to you. Smiling, chatting and holding your hand for up to 2 minutes while you try to act cool and your internal social programming is saying "woah, when do we break contact ? how long is this going to last ? should I squeeze his hand ? no, don't squeeze it, that's only with girls. what do I do ?" And I'm sure these guys can sense the discomfort and they continue to do it because its good for us. "why don't the westerners just chill out ?"

Because our brains are overclocked.

oh, much more boredoms here:
http://wizardishungry.com/blog/archive/77_boadrum_adis


Oh, I forgot to mention that I recorded a bunch of stuff with one of the Boredoms drummers, E-da. We met in Barcelona at the Wrong festival and got together in the UK where he lives. But this post is getting so long ! We recorded at my mother's little cottage in a beautiful valley in the Cotswald's, E-da playing ferociously on the lawn. The neighbors didn't seem to mind at all.
Uh... the recordings are good. I should release on the net or something, right ?

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I've been doing the Dance Music Business Resource since 1995, back when it was on hyperreal.org. Articles and info for artists and small labels. Recently I've been posting interesting industry news items and adding some new content about downloads etc.