Performance Review: Backstage Ep. 2

When we recorded this, innocent pre-disaster optimism ambounded in Los Angeles. So much so that despite my general suspicion of any broadcast even vaguely resembling a podcast, we were eager and excited to recap the year in live events, to enter into the radio imagination what we intend to transcribe extensively and globally this year. Then the city the three of us grew up in, went up in flames. One day it was really very windy, by nightfall, a hurricane of fire had obliterated neighborhoods all over Los Angeles, one neighborhood in particular that housed many musicians and artist friends, loved ones, and colleagues, was gone in a flash. Frenzy, disbelief, and nihilism robbed us of our ambitions for a while. Now, we’re back with a bit of a vengeance against disaster, false starts, the silos that keep threatening our communities with alienation and dysfunction, and our own collective complicity, however imperceptible, with ecological and socioeconomic structures that make more space for catastrophizing than daydreaming and improvising together. We’re sharing our feelings about live music from over a month ago, even though it feels like a dispatch from a former, more naive world. And we’re stepping into tomorrow and a year of forcing ourselves to live in the moment with more intention, more risk and rigor in how and what we attend. The prevailing sentiment is that if we don’t dismantle our necrotic patterns of spectatorship and performance, we will be dutifully seated in very expensive tickets to the fall of many empires at once. Since what we cherish most is music and the poetics that allow it to thrive, the stakes of our silence on the matter are higher now. Don’t mistake this banter for casual, we’re urgently forming quiet collectives made up of those who intend to shame the environments that are hostile to real feeling or ask art to try and prop up the dying neoliberal world order using mere representation and the idea of beauty and truth devoid of substance. Celestial, crunk, and gully in spirit, we proceed. Stay tuned for our first written series early next month.