The lights drop and a single spotlight shines on a synthesizer set, covered by a large mosquito net.
As a small man wearing sunglasses and a grey hoodie walks out on stage, the audience cheers and claps their hands in anticipation for the beginning of a great show.
Brian De Graw or “bEEdEEgEE,” the drummer for the experimental group Gang Gang Dance, sits down beneath the mosquito net and plays this.
A quarter of the crowd loved it and began “jammin’ out.”
Another quarter was intrigued and slowly moved their head to the beat. But to the ordinary concert-goer who was excited for the main performer, Animal Collective, bEEdEEgEE was a strange collection of rattling rhythms, syncopated electronic beeps and an occasional dolphin noise.
The indie music news blog Stereogum recently chose bEEdEEgEE’s new album SUM/ONE as their album of the week.
The article notes that DeGraw ”put together SUM/ONE alone, in his home studio in upstate New York, doing the whole thing as an experiment in planned-out music.” According to the music bloggers,
…when he’s recording on his own, there’s a sparse cleanliness to the way DeGraw uses these sounds; it’s almost like they’ve been graphed out. SUM/ONE is also very much a dance music album that thinks of itself as a dance music album.
Another writer applauds DeGraw for inviting Lizzi Bougatsos of Gang Gang Dance to be featured on a song, but he is disappointed when Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip makes another track sound like his own than of bEEdEEgEE’s.
Between the half-dozen articles written about SUM/ONE, the following words are used to describe the album:
- windblown, propulsive house-music thump
- disco muscle
- oceanic swirl
- barefoot shamanic dancing
- deep R&B piano lines meeting trap beats meeting straight-ahead electro-pop meeting hazy ambience
- feel-good balearic house
- slippery rhythmic constructions of grime and bashment
- an orchestral sex jam periodically swarmed by a cloud of angry cyborg cicadas
Music has vastly changed in the past ten years with the indie revolution, and once lesser-known bands such as Vampire Weekend and Two Door Cinema Club have hit the radio waves (it was an irregularity for tenth graders in Frederick County, MD to listen to them in 2010).
But there is a whole new layer of underground electronic music to be peeled away and explored, like sound designer Yosi Horikawa or recording engineer Rashad Becker.
But now we ask you, readers: what do you think of bEEdEEgEE? Is this experimental music or organized sound?
