The Automatik

Twiropa
April 5, 2004

I bought the tickets for this show so long ago that I almost forgot about it. My excitement also waned considerably since the ticket purchase due to my somewhat less than enthusiastic feelings about Air’s latest album Talkie Walkie, but I knew it would be an enjoyable show anyway. And despite my disappointment upon finding out that Jason Falkner would not be touring with them this time, I was looking forward to seeing those French tiny gypsies, Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin, and Redd Kross’s Brian Reitzell on drums.

As the day of the show approached, I found myself getting, as the kids say, “psyched.” I left work early and went home to walk my dog. She was acting lethargic which seemed fairly unusual. Then, she was sick to her stomach and I got a bit worried. Then, my fianc� called to tell me that the banquet hall where we had reserved our wedding reception suddenly had a For Sale sign on its door. With our wedding a month away, to say I was disturbed would be an understatement. He made some calls, reserved another place, my dog began feeling better, and my mood improved as I got ready for the show.

I went to pick up the friend who was accompanying me at 7:30. Her lights were out, her car was there, and no one answered when I knocked on the door, rang the doorbell, and called her on the phone. After ten minutes I became annoyed. Her neighbor walked by with her dog and seemed concerned. We walked down the side of the house and banged on the windows but no answer. After the events of an hour earlier, I was understandably upset and a bit aggravated.

After a half hour of asking other neighbors, more phone calls, knocks on the door, and even a check of my own answering machine, I decided she must have had a last-minute emergency or schedule conflict, so I left. There was irritating traffic, I turned down the wrong street twice, but I finally got where I needed to be and started driving towards the venue, one which I had never before visited. And I kept driving and driving and…driving.

Pristine, empty streets with a perplexing lack of residents or cars and giant empty lots and somewhat foreboding warehouses became more and more prevalent. I turned down a side street to sort of follow a car that I hoped was also heading to the show. But no, it just led to a dead end street with a group of people hanging out on the corner. So I turned down another side street to backtrack and ended up hopelessly trying to navigate through massive potholes in the now unpaved streets. After a few more minutes of driving and a near panic attack, there was Twiropa, a line of hipsters, and a place to park.

I met up with my co-worker/friend and his boyfriend and hugged him out of sheer gratitude to see a familiar face. I also greeted a friend that I had only previously known from the �net. Although there was some massive confusion with the ticket lines, we eventually made our way inside.

Twiropa looks not unlike The Hacienda, Tony Wilson and Factory records’ 80s club and the birthplace of rave. There are at least three “antechambers” and fully stocked bars before you get to the actual stage area. Mysteriously, the same three songs kept playing as maximum volume: Bananarama’s “Venus” and “Cruel Summer” and “Get Outta My Dreams and Into My Car.”

The pre-show activities consisted of trying to scream over the music whilst figuring out which bands on the 97X play list we liked best. Mosquito, the opening band came on then, a sort of poor man’s Stereolab with a female lead singer who had some rather intriguing “dance” moves: contorting her arms behind her head like a snake charmer and then holding the pose, hunching over and throwing her arms forward like she was getting punched in the stomach, and a leg maneuver which I didn’t actually see but which I was assured was lame. Granted, they did an interesting cover of The Monkees’ “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” and “Bizarre Love Triangle” by New Order (although they may have actually just been covering the Frente! cover), but I was pretty bored.

My friends and I were trying to determine if the singer was from the Bjork school of freaky/bothersome stage antics when after a song ended and there was a sprinkle of polite applause, she actually MEOWED. Uh, yeah. Later, she cooed like a pigeon. I was convinced she was going to start cawing, but thankfully we were spared.

The between set music was The Who’s Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bouncy, but it was so loud and trebly, we had to retire to an antechamber just to have a conversation, a conversation in which I brought up lame songs from the 90s and sang parts of them to prove that they were indeed lame. When the telltale prog rock keyboards of Air started, I ran back to the stage, my friends following and laughing at me.

The stage setup was pretty similar to when I saw Air at La Zona Rosa in Austin in 2001, but JB wasn’t wearing an eyepatch; rather, he looked dapper in a black fitted shirt, tie, vest, and newsboy cap. I was extremely saddened to notice that not only was there no Jason Falkner, there was also no Brian Reitzell on drums. They sounded great, but the lack of songs from 10,000 Hz. Legend was a bummer, although I don’t know how they could’ve done “Radio #1″ or “Don’t Be Light” without Falkner (even “Playground Love” was instrumental). I would’ve settled for “Sex Born Poison,” however. “Run,” “Surfing on a Rocket,” and “Biological” were fantastic as was their final encore, an extremely drawn out jam of one of the songs off Moon Safari whose name currently escapes me.

They performed rollicking versions of “Kelly Watch the Stars” and “Sexy Boy,” versions which didn’t deserve to be greeted by yet another strange dance move, but this time from audience members: that combo of fist pumping and Arsenio Hall “wooh wooh” arm movement with a sort of Hang Ten fingers/wrist flick hand gesture that seemed better suited for a Dave Matthews show. And of course, there was at least one confirmed snake charmer. But JB and Nicolas were cute and charming and French so I tried to get over it.

It was a great show and I had a lovely time. But consider this: the first time I went to see Air, I got stuck in a grounded plane in Dallas for six hours during a lightning storm and my friends got stuck driving through the lightning storm to meet me in Austin. I think someone might be telling me to not see any more of their shows.

By the way, the friend who never showed? I found out the next morning that she had a terrible migraine and was passed out in her bedroom the whole time. An unpleasant scene to be sure, but better than my visions of her beaten and left for dead in an alleyway somewhere.