“This one’s for you Susan.”
It’s been a while since I’ve been to a show at the Echoplex. When I first moved to Los Angeles, it quickly became a favorite venue for a wide array of bands, and I covered a lot of fun gigs there. Somewhere along the line, I stopped making it to as many, and I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe I was just working too much, and I was too exhausted even to try, or maybe I just wasn’t seeing the bands that I wanted to see getting booked there. So what a hell of a time to go back to see one of my all-time favorites, Mclusky, tear the fucker apart!
In 2008, the Dresden Dolls would play Los Angeles for, seemingly, the last time. In 2008, I was 23 years old, still in college in the rural North of California, fairly isolated from the meccas of civilization and regular concerts of better-known bands. I missed it. After moving to Los Angeles the following year to attempt and fail at breaking into the film industry, I had all but lost hope of ever seeing the Dresden Dolls perform.
Anyone following Steven Wilson’s career, either via his work with Porcupine Tree or solo, has at least a tertiary understanding of his work as a remixer. He has done remixes of back catalogs for absolute legends like King Crimson, YES, XTC, ELP, and Jethro Tull, not to mention one-offs of bands like Black Sabbath, Opeth, Caravan, Chicago; the list goes on. He has spoken in interviews stressing the difference between a remix and a remaster and how much more work goes into remixing. Surround sound is nothing exactly new in this day and age. Still, technology has advanced over the years since 5.1 gave way to 7.1, which gave way to Dolby Atmos – the current standard for theatrical surround sound – allowing for all sorts of experimentation as home sound systems have been catching up.