Baltimore Round Robin (Feet Night) @ Mass Art, 10.03.08

The first Feet night of Dan Deacon’s Baltimore Round Robin brain child was Friday night at Mass Art’s Pozin Gymnasium.

Before expounding on how the entire affair went down, one must understand how the concert was set up. As promoted, bands set up in an almost complete circle around the gym. Since the space was inadequate to fit 15 plus acts many bands shared space and instruments. The Death Set shared space with Video Hippos while Future Islands played on top of Nuclear Power Pants and spoken word artists inhabited Dan Deacon’s spot. The set up was reminiscent of a convention where booths can be rented, except instead of shilling merchandise or signing autographs people played music. And to extend the convention/booth metaphor further, almost none of the bands had the funds to pay for their own booth so they had to piggy back with another artist. In this regard the set up was quite endearing because it reinforced the idea that the Baltimore scene is just that and the bands and artists are comfortable or friendly enough with one another to be in such close proximity.

Each artist had a chance to play one song before the spotlight was tossed to another artist almost instantaneously. The crowd would rush from side to side in order to get closer to whichever artist was currently performing. However, as the crowd grew and the night went on people started to stake out spots in front of bands they liked most. Anticipating Dan Deacon’s next song people refrained from leaving his booth in order to get front positioning for his next song.

Of course this was not always the case and more often than not people flooded in front of the artist playing. When they did people would quickly inhabit the “stage” of a non performing artist. One minute Video Hippos had playing space and the next people pushed between their drums and mic stands in order to see the siamese twin lead singer(s) of Nuclear Power Pants.

The benefits of the round robin format was it’s uniqueness and it’s ability to better foster performance pieces such as Sports Ghost and a quick comedy sketch between Deacon and a friend (”Look, I put this bird in glue”). A particularly effective moment came early on in the night when a Double Dagger performance ended and the attention shifted across the room to the deep, bouyant bass similar to that of a tanker ship’s horn. The noise resonated throughout the hall and slowly altered its course. Spoken word and courseless noise was added to the horn as lights created towering shadows on the gym’s walls. It wasn’t exactly dance inducing as was promised, but it was undeniably entertaining and different.

However, the format also prevents any momentum from being created. Single songs from incongruent artists peppered with performance pieces don’t enjoy the luxury of being able to work and adapt to a crowd’s energy and mood. Everything must be preordained and thus extremely rigid. Although the entire event was run incredibly efficiently the night missed the unmistakable build up of a good concert.

That being said, perhaps that was not the point and that’s fair enough. The Baltimore Round Robin was very different from your average concert and it was the first Feet night of the tour so perhaps momentum must be forfeited in light of something very unusual. In that regard the night was a success, but the format could definitely be improved upon or tweaked in order to better capture and increase audience’s inherent energy.

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