Quintron & Miss Pussycat, One Eyed Jacks, New Orleans
Yarmulkes, kufis, turbans and top hats off to Mr. Quintron.
I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a camera to a show. You probably have. At a certain point there’s a decision - if you’re there to take pictures - about whether or not you’re going to remain an outsider. You need to figure out the best balance between exacting artistic standards and your spleen’s gut busting desire to move. In other words, there is a certain point where the camera just needs to go away. At a Quintron show that is about five minutes in.
Seriously, I felt like the kid with the cast sitting on the side of the pool. Because it was sort of liquid, this writhing mess of slimy, slippery kids, all drenched in whiskey sweat and swamp air. And me with my fancy camera. So away it went in its bag in the corner, with prayers to the gods of Japanese electronics, while I plunged Dionysian into the worship of Quintron.
And Miss Pussycat. We shouldn’t forget her. But however talented are her maracas and marionettes, this show is about the man in the driver’s seat.
I usually try to spin reviews into elaborately extracted metaphors. Usually it involves The Times, or the Kids Being Alright, or What This Means For Music, but really I just want to talk about something we’ve all tried to forget: that rave in the cave scene from the second Matrix movie. That’s kind of what it was like; drenched in sweat, pulsing and hot and rhythmic. All without those horrible headphone jacks sticking out of everyone’s body.
It’s hard to imagine how the whole spectacle must have looked from the point of view of the stage. Here’s Quintron, sweaty and long since shirtless, cranking a dial and pushing a button and sending new motion, a new tempo rippling through his public. The ebb and flow of his rhythms nestles with a beautiful delicacy among the loose folds of our lubricated brains, trickles down our nervous systems, altering, modulating and metastasizing until through the tips of your very fingernails you can hurl it right back up at him, his own beat, the whole shebang right back at this sweaty flabby genius of crowd control.
There’s a sophistication to Quintron’s music, if you care to look for it. And if you don’t care to look for it, well, whatever, because you should be dancing anyway. It’s that drive to dance - unmistakable, insistent - that this artist brings to the table.
Dubbed swamp tech (probably by Quintron’s own hand), the experience closely resembles being submerged in electrified swamp water. Everything, every body, is slippery. The air is so thick with humidity inside the club that it catches in your throat. But it’s that same humidity that also catches the big bass rhythms coming off the stage, pulsing with it, becoming a musical instrument in its own right.
So you’re swaying in this hot dark dank club that Quintron has somehow transformed into a subwoofer all around you, you’re jostled and bumped and bifurcated but never quite getting to the point where moshing is appropriate. Suddenly it feels like the 60’s in San Francisco or maybe the 70’s in CBGB and everybody has something to prove. They prove it with their knees and elbows and their hair, wet and wild, swaying metronome to the music. After awhile you don’t even know. The Greeks called it kairos, a time between time. It carries the implication of enlightenment, transcendence, forgetting mixed with knowing, and acceptance. At any time during a Quintron show the maraca beats will part like the Red Sea, and jumping in, it is possible, even easy, to forget all about yourself.
By its energy you want to call it a punk show. But parts of it could pass for a very tongue-in-cheek 10 year old's birthday party and most all of it would feel comfortable dancing around the fire roasted corpse of a fatted calf, tribute to the fear and wonder of the world. For my money, this kind of performance can’t be beat. It’s why we listen to music: to connect to our fellow fancy apes, to literally become the beat in our movements and thoughts and to transcend the responsibility of individuality along with the tedium of the day, toward an experience wholly and completely different from the quotidian.
So that when we do return to our jobs or our beds or our bathtubs, those simple experiences carry within them, maybe in the smallest ways, the memory of what else has happened, and what will certainly occur again in our futures. And that knowledge is precious: that we can choose to participate (or not) in the closest thing to a group mind ever achieved without a scalpel. That’s why we spend the money to go to shows, the same reason the devout go to church: to be with our brothers and sisters of the faith and to know, with certainty, that they’ll be there to catch us when we go crowd surfing.
Yarmulkes, kufis, turbans and top hats off to Mr. Quintron. Please, take that money you were saving for the collection plate and spend it on a ticket to see this show.
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