Five minutes into Tanlines’ set Friday night at the Whitney Museum, a chorus of chirping crickets was the only sound to be heard, steadily filling though the room was with a few hundred people. This is to say nothing of the crowd’s reception of the duo’s blend of new-wavey synth pop and percussive Caribbean rhythms, however; it was Tanlines’ PA system - tropical Skittles-colored cables and all - filling the silence between songs.
The crickets were only one of the myriad quirks that buoyed this otherwise underpowered opener during the Whitney Live series’ final date of the summer. See also Jesse Cohen's (drums and software) omniferous use of the exclamatory/interrogative/conjunctive, “Tanlines!” as a stand-in for anything from “thanks,” to “let’s do this,” to “alright!” A typical inter-song exchange went something like this: “Alright guys, we’re Tanlines. We’re gonna do another few songs. Okay, so...Tanlines. Yeah! Tanlines!” This, of course, was met with whoops from the audience of, “Yeah! Tanliiiiiiines!”
Perhaps sensing some of the venue-to-content mismatch of the set, Cohen informed us, a few songs in, that he had just had an out of body experience, wherein he found himself “on the Today Show.” The point wasn’t lost on the crowd in the over-lit, under-amplified room, nor on the Madison Avenue 7:30pm passers-by whose heads intermittently dotted the periphery of the sub-street level performance space.
The crowd warmed up - and got to dancing as the room filled up - but the most sonically-fulfilling moment of their set didn’t come until the impromptu encore, when Cohen finally removed the mutes (read: t-shirts) from his floor tom and bongos and coaxed some really compelling percussion out of the non-computer side of the Tanlines setup. Overall, the pair pumped out a great set that suffered only slightly from the incongruous scales of the acoustics and the room.
DJ /rupture (Jace Clayton) followed quickly on Tanlines’ heels, wasting none of the momentum attained in the last few minutes of their set, when the crowd finally reached room-filling proportions and tipped the balance from texting to dancing. Clayton spun a typically globe-trotting and scholarly set, his selections spanning five continents and at least as many languages. Dressed all in lavender and characteristically stoic behind the decks, he opened with a heavy Cumbia rhythm, and continued through cuts of reggaeton, dubstep and dancehall, also weaving in 90‘s house, some Akon, and something I’m pretty sure was in Hindi.
Friday marked the third time I’ve seen /rupture spin, and it’s a testament to the breadth and depth of his vinyl omnivory that each show has been completely distinct from the last, and that only this Friday’s featured any material from either of his two better-known LPs, 2008’s Uproot and 2009’s Matt Shadetek collab, Solar Life Raft. True to his radio DJ chops, (New Yorkers, check out his Monday night show on WFMU 91.1) he’s just as capable of putting on an hour-long clinic on a single genre as he is of spinning an hour-long clinic on shaking ass. I guess you could say his selections speak the languages of brains and butts with equal fluency.
For me, it’s the balance /rupture strikes between these two that keeps me coming back. I enjoy his album-length releases plenty, but the best thing /rupture’s mixes and shows have done for me is to turn, say, 30 minutes of listening into nearly that many leads on new artists and genres. For proof, one need only check the mega-parenthetical track titles on his mixes, citing collaborators, remixers, loops, samples and their origins. And as much as the grimier and dancier moments of Friday night got me moving, I couldn’t help but suspect that the abrupt and definitive close of the set might’ve been due to Clayton wanting to steal upstairs before closing time and check out the foundational turntablism on display at the Christian Marclay exhibit. Even at the dance party, always the scholar.
