There's a huge gap between the last ticket for Sigur Ros in 2002 and this one in 2006 for Lady Sovereign, but that fact shouldn't be used to conclude that I stopped going to shows for four years. For reasons I'm still not clear on, I stopped collecting tickets from shows in 2002 and it didn't occur to me to save them again until 2006. During this time, I'm sure that I saw Clutch, Meat Beat Manifesto, Mogwai, Mono, Low, Grandmaster Flash, and Sigur Ros a second time. Thankfully, I came to my senses when I went to see the five foot wonder, Lady Sovereign.

The DJ that opened the show was playing a weird mix that went from old school Prodigy to hot off the press dubstep dubplates, and it was a great way to warm up for the SOV. Lady Sovereign's vocal style is unique and her rhymes are funny, but the thing that pushes her over the edge for me is her production. Sure, her big label follow up to the much smaller debut wimped out on a lot of the weirder bass and rhythms that she started with, but it still gave us "Love me or Hate me" which is an absolute classic.

Make no mistake, Lady Sovereign is really only 5'1", but when she takes the stage, she commands it. She was nursing a cold when we saw her, but she still jumped all around hyping people up and yelling most of the lyrics to her songs. She's got a huge amount of charisma and it all comes through in the way she has carried herself in a world where a short white woman is not usually a star. Since this show I've not heard much at all about her. Like most flashes in a pan, she's probably burned through whatever hipster credit she got and the people from this show have likely moved on to something else. But she's a real talent and a great performer, so I hope to see her doing something else again soon.

Every once in a while, I hope that a show is going to be transcendent. I put aside all of my jaded history of seeing bands, playing shows myself, and of being disappointed by artists that I really admire, and I just walk into a building hoping to be carried off the Earthly plane. There are only certain bands through which an experience like this is even possible, and usually when I hope for it, everything falls through. With Sigur Ros in 2002, still just ahead of the curve of their popularity, it seemed like I might just have a shot.

Sigur Ros makes music that wants to be transcendent. They are almost incapable of playing in the middle--everything is either tiny and emotionally compact or huge and sweeping and bombastic. I love that, and that's exactly what usually makes for a good show. The other component of a good show is a good venue, one where the sound and ambience fit the band and Variety Playhouse seemed like a good choice for Sigur Ros. Alas, my plans for a night of exceptional connection to music were foiled by the seating plan.

While the Variety Playhouse has seating, there's a standing room space in front of all of the theater seats that typically gets swollen with younger fans who want to be close to the band. After doing this for a while, I'm quite content to be back a ways, in the middle of the room where I can hear everything perfectly and see everything just well enough. I also like sitting down, especially for a band like Sigur Ros, where I'm not going to be inspired to dance or jump around as much as close my eyes and sway.

The problem with this arrangement at Variety is that when the standing room fills up, the first 15 or so rows of seats are farily useless because the room isn't sloped enough for people sitting to see over those who are standing. So people stand at their seats in the first row. Then the second. Then the third, because really, how can you see through people standing at their seats in rows one and two? This effect fans back like a slow-motion version of the wave, but where people never sit back down to let the wave ebb. When this happens, I want to stop the show and just ask if people can figure out that the seats are for sitting and the standing is for standing--but of course that would never work. So I managed to watch most of Sigur Ros with my head cranked sideways as I peered through the gap in between some guy's arm and his torso, and around someone else's head. I think I saw mostly the drummer.

So after waiting for that once in a lifetime experience and watching it fall flat through the fidgety body parts of others, I decided that maybe transcendent concert experiences weren't for me anymore. If Sigur Ros couldn't do it, and if Cocteau Twins couldn't do it, then what hope was there? Some years later, I would see a movie about a band that came close to the effect I was looking for, so I can at least say now that all hope is not lost. It's just not likely to be found on the floor of the Variety Playhouse.

I didn't think that Negativland was going to be much of a live band. I loved the documentary Sonic Outlaws that spent a lot of its running time profiling the copyright pranks and illegal art that Negativland does so well, but none of that seemed like something you would go to a club to see on a stage. I loved what they did with "The Letter U and the Numeral 2" but again, would it really translate to a performance?

Happily, the answer was a resounding YES. Negativland not only won me over with unfamiliar material, they did so in style. The campy, psychadelic songs have never been my favorite part of their repoitoire, but even those were somehow charming in person. What they did with a mid-show puppet theater act was silly and adventurous and I loved it, but when they ended the show with a song where they ran film through a projector, stopping it long enough to melt and burn each frame as it passed in front of the bulb, I was in awe. It took a few minutes for me to figure out what they were doing because I was so interested in how it looked on stage. When I started to smell the burning celluloid, I looked over and saw someone purposefully creating a huge plume of smoke from melted film stock and I fell in love with the whole thing.

Negativland informed a lot of what I have tried to do over the years. A respect for their pioneering use of found sound and abusive copyright infringement to make a point can certainly be seen in my own work. Negativland (along with bands like Meat Beat Manifesto and Pop Will Eat Itself) helped me to forge an understanding of reappropriation as a creative choice rather than just a lazy endeavor. They also helped to solidify for me the importance of making all of that culture mashup entertaining in some way, so that it didn't seem like an academic exercise in musical diction or sound collage. Negativland not only had ideas behind their work, they also knew what would make people laugh and think and what would make people want to go home and start cutting up vhs tapes or audio files.

In the digital age, an act like Negativland is almost quaint. Culturejamming and sampling and mashups of every conceivable type have become some commonplace that there are more cultural references in an average episode of Family Guy than there were in many early works of sample/cut-up collage music. Of course most of what makes it to an audience is still mundane or obvious or without any point other than to be funny for a moment, the fact remains that a new generation of kids raised on home-made YouTube parodies are not likely to get what was so magical about Negativland doing what they did the old fashioned way.

I never realized that Soul Coughing had become a well-known entity. I picked up on them around the time of "Super Bon-Bon" because that song was catchy as hell and because they had this interesting approach to pop music that was almost like a jazz quartet influenced by drum n bass who replaced the horns with a sampler. In fact, I was explaining how Soul Coughing worked to someone the other day and I was reminded of how amazing it was to see a group that relied on samples for a lot of the sound, but where the guy playing the samples was just a part of the band who had to be good at playing the samples and not just good at pressing the spacebar on a laptop. I liken what that guy was doing to someone like Kid Koala who takes pre-recorded sound and makes something entirely new with it right in front of your eyes. I perform electronic music all the time, but it's no secret that what I and what most people who perform with computers are doing is maniupulating the sounds, not triggering them in real time with the dexterity of an instrumentalist.

Of course someone with a laptop somewhere is throwing his hands up about to complain that I'm saying that there is no art to playing with a laptop, and no skill--that's not it at all. I take what I do very seriously, but at the same time I moved away from the 'how well can I trigger the sounds at the right times' model to the 'how well can I influence and mix and change the sounds in real time' model, which seems to work better for me.

The Soul Coughing guy though used his MIDI controller and his Akai sampler the same way some other person might have used a sax, guitar, or drumkit, and I found that really exciting. I wasn't sure why the Masquarade was so packed with people to see a band that I thought was my own little indulgence, but I was glad to see that a band doing something like that was getting some attention. They broke up not too long after that tour and Mike Doughty went on to make some solo records, but that configuration didn't have the same appeal for me.

I don't remember buying a ticket for this, I only remember thinking that Underwater should have opened the show. I'm trying to recall a Hooverphonic song now and the only thing I'm coming up with is a Dot Allison song from around the same time or maybe a few years later. After Portishead and Tricky, there was a trip hop explosion of bands like Hooverphonic. To be fair to them (because Underwater was in a bit of the same boat,) I'm sure that they had nothing to do with being lumped in with the trip hop masses other than the fact that they rode the wave where it was going at the time. I think that after Massive Attack's Mezzanine came out, the game was up and people couldn't play the 'they are like the new Portishead' card anymore. Besides, most of the bands like Hooverphonic never had much to do with the Portishead/Tricky/Massive Attack aesthetic--they just had female singers and laid-back songs and sometimes that's all an undiscerning audience or writer needs to come up with a label, marketing plan, and concert tour.