Redeye - Hard drives and hard driving October 18 2006

It’s fall, and there’s a crisp air of setting back clocks and getting off rocks. “To everything there is a season” — that’s some Ecclesiastes on that ass. And while we’re getting biblical, let’s talk about Lenny’s on Sat., Oct. 14, hosting the Atlanta 2006 Laptop Battle Finals.

“What’s a ‘Laptop Battle’?” you ask. It’s like a crackled LCD on LSD; it’s when speakers spew sonic rainbow showers. It’s Rocktober for geeks, trading power chords for PowerBooks to advance to the national finals in Seattle. This is hot audio sex on a magnetic spinning platter. Hosted by Matt Jeanes of Larvae, the lineup featured laptop artists all seeming named like Metroid or Space Ghost characters (minus “Graham Coleman,” named after the cracker and the camping gear). A standout was risiculous gesticulous sample-smudging miniDESTROY!, who kept crowd attention cradled like balls in a palm and looked in my opinion like Jeffrey Sebelia from “Project Runway.”

This tale of mice and men featured melodic jabba to digitally mangled gabba snaking through the dark sea of hoodies and chicks who look either too young to already be hanging out in a dive bar or too old to still be hanging out in a dive bar. Either way, hurray beer!

And the crowd demanded “Less Stop More ‘Top!” until keyboard and headbanger Threv (of WREK/Secret Life) emerged victorious. Judge Richard Devine (an internationally renowned frequency felcher) found the crowd’s support refreshing; Devine’s only lament was no “Music Most Like a Mechanized Grudge Fuck” category. Maybe next year... .

This all reminds me of a conversation. A colleague has conceived of specialized coupling called Pjörn — unrelenting all-Icelandic sex set to the digitally twiddled symphonies, make that nymphonies, of Björk. Imagine an all-white room filled with pixyish seductresses bound in FireWire cables and burning with geothermal desire. An electron microscope would find a microcosm of giggling whales and pirouetting polar bears in the opalescent emissions of their mercurial sex. And when the guys ejaculate glittery strands of musical notes they stretch out their arms and honk like giant swans. If Fischerspooner and that Cremaster Cycle could be a hit, then some Chelsea art gallery is gonna eat this shit up.

However, until those royalties trickle in I cover fully clothed nightlife. So I visited eleven50, where locally based DJ/producer Gene Carbonell commemorated his retirement from live performance with unrelenting seks-tual tension. With a rarified selection sense, Carbonell wove through 10-plus undulating years of prog rafters-rattlers, including his own dark drivers and those of Bedrock, BBE, Red Shift and more. You’ll be missed, have no doubt.

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RedEye celebrates going out and going off. Send comments to redeye@creativeloafing.com, but hand-scrawled hate mail is preferred.

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