For an artist hailed as an establishment in electronic music, Dosh has a lot of seemingly conventional instruments. Martin Dosh came on stage first, surrounded by his electric piano and drum kit. Mike Lewis took a place between his saxophone and bass guitar, and Jeremy Ylvisaker rounded it out with a vintage Airline guitar. But after a few songs I realized that Dosh's electronic magic is as much a function of performance as recording. Live, Dosh masterfully stacks and loops instrumental lines and fragments and underlays them with own breakneck drumming. Whether you want to call this electronica is an open question.
Counterintuitively, Dosh's sound is jazz-like at times, despite the songs being carefully crafted and engineered. This resemblance results not only from a similar vocabulary---rapid drums and fluid saxophone---but from the experimentation in sounds and tempo and improvisation underlying Dosh's final product. Dosh's sound is a distillation of years' experimentation in just how far and fast he can take his music without devolving into incoherence or repetitiveness. The highly refined product may not produce a strong emotional reaction, but the crowd's consensus was that Dosh succeeded in his experiment.
