The Luckiest Dragon

Have you seen this?

I skipped, for various reasons I now realize are lame, some three Lucky Dragons shows in Portland. Like for sleep. Or food. Work. Had-other-shit-going-on.

Sunday, after a cool seven hours in the office trying to write 600 words on Matmos in a surly mental fog brought on by a pair of seriously late nights, I'd all but given up on the show. Besides, it was raining, my bike had just snapped a brake cable (front, natch), and, well, I just really wanted to read for a scotch or two at the Tavern. Mainly, I just wanted to be alone, and there's something to be said for being alone in a public place. With Scotch.

But, after about a page and half, a pair of loose friends came in to get a couple of take-out bottles for the show. Ten minutes later I'm riding my rear brake down from Bolton Hill in a heavy rain.

Lucky Dragons played at Floristree, the sixth floor of a six-floor warehouse building (that has, like, two other pseudo venues in it) in a part of Baltimore that's, oh, 6 out of 10 on the sketch scale. But I've never heard of anyone getting jacked and the neighborhood lurkers seem pretty accustomed to the steady stream of hipstery, arty looking white kids coming and going every day. It's a cool thing they have going. No one in the DC/Baltimore area can match it for booking. Good sound. Big. Friendly. All door monies go to the band. And, again, it's a lived-in warehouse.

Back to Lucky Dragons. He played some album stuff--cracked out laptop folk stutter, mainly--which was beautiful and musically un-live, aside from some vocals and play with a MIDI pressure pad of some kind. His part was mainly an entirely possessed and sort of sexual interpretive dance. Thrust and genuflect, thrust and genuflect. That sort of thing.

The second half was "Make a Baby" and that's really why I'm writing here now. Fischbeck passes out these tapestry shrouded cables with metal contacts at the end. A few people in the audience know what's up and get really close. He doesn't explain anything, just demonstrates. He grabs a girl's hand, one of the folks holding a cable, and it makes a sound, a sort of droning bell sound. And he grabs someone else's hand and the pitch changes. He grabs a hand and puts it on another person's arm. People start getting it. More crowd around. Fischbeck goes around the room, inviting people into the circle. Strangers are touching and grabbing other strangers. Suddenly, you're stroking someone's fingers while someone's holding your elbow. The sound gets more and more complicated, and more and more beautiful.

Everyone's smiling because they get it, get that this isn't just some technological magic trick. You can't make these sounds (in the end, it doesn't even matter what they are) by yourself. You could have all of Fischbeck's pretty cables to yourself and you couldn't do much with them. You could hit them against things, whirl them in the air, jump rope; nothing will happen. You need the people around you to make it work. You need to touch them and you need to let them touch you. "Make a Baby" is like an aural schematic of this beautiful animal thing that doesn't have a name really.

The other bands were good, but that's for another time. In the end, I stayed at the Floristree until well past three, drinking beer, playing with cats, and talking about these things with a friend.