These days it’s hard to imagine dance music without electronic noises, drum machine sounds and computer-generated effects. Yet that’s the idea behind the Berlin-based band The Whitest Boy Alive, which performs at Legacy Taipei on Thursday.
The group, led by Norwegian vocalist Erlend Oye of the indie folk-pop band Kings of Convenience, is bringing back an organic feel to electronica grooves by using only rock instruments: guitar, drums and bass. There’s also a keyboardist, but he only uses vintage analog synthesizers from the 1960s and 1970s — no fancy computer-powered keyboards with databanks of thousands of sounds.
The Whitest Boy Alive’s music is a sparse, heavily groove-oriented indie rock. Oye’s warm but detached vocals ride on a tight rhythm section that pumps out funky disco rhythms with machine-like precision.
Photo by Katharina Poblotzki, Courtesy of The Wall/The Whitest Boy Alive
Each band member plays all of their parts live. On the band’s latest album, Rules (2009), there is no overdubbing, except for the vocals.
“When we started [The Whitest Boy Alive], we wanted to create a band that is able to play music in a way you would program it on a computer,” wrote keyboardist Daniel Nentwig in an e-mail interview with the Taipei Times.
“All the members [were] producing electronic music before they joined together as [The Whitest Boy Alive] and are influenced by early house and techno music,” he said.
Nentwig, 33, points out that house and techno’s roots go back to 1970s disco and soul, which were performed “with real instruments and by real musicians.”
“We play an advanced sum of three decades of dance music — now again with our own hands and feet,” he said.
Oye and Nentwig provide tonal color in The Whitest Boy Alive’s songs, often imitating electronica riffs on electric guitar and a Rhodes piano (the classic warm-sounding electronic piano used on many classic rock jazz and soul recordings in the 1960s and 1970s) and a Crumar synthesizer, a vintage keyboard. Oye even makes his voice sound like a digital loop on the song Courage, in which he repeats the word “courage” over and over again.
The backbone of the band is bassist Marcin Oz and drummer Sebastian Maschat, who maintain the band’s repetitive, almost mechanized grooves.
“Trying to play the same one-bar loop over and over again might seem to be very boring for many other musicians,” Nentwig said. “For us, it is a source of motivation and particularly challenging to get the right groove all the time. Acting like ‘human sequencers’ is actually big fun.”
And there is one advantage to the band’s no-overdubs, what-you see-is-what-you-get-approach, Nentwig says. “We didn’t have to transform the recorded music into a live show — it was already there,” he said. “What you hear on the album is how we play live on stage.”
The Whitest Boy Alive isn’t expected to become the next wave of disco rock superstars, at least in the eyes of music critics.
Rules wasn’t as well received as the band’s 2006 debut Dreams, eliciting mixed reviews from the Guardian and US music Web site Pitchfork.
Still, the band appears to have a fair number of avid followers, even in Taipei. As of press time, the 1,400 tickets available for their Taipei concert were close to being sold out, according to Vivian Lu (呂欣如) at music promoter and live venue The Wall (這牆), which is promoting the band’s show at Legacy Taipei.
Nentwig says the band discovered that they had a “huge following” in South America and Mexico on a recent tour there.
As for their next album, Nentwig didn’t offer a firm release date, except to say it would come out “sooner or later,” but said the band was working on new songs with “different influences, like [Afrobeat] music from the 1970s.” When asked to sum up the difference between deejaying dance music and performing it live, Nentwig said, “It feels good to make people dance, it doesn’t matter how you do it. It’s all about having a good time.”
“For [us] it is most important to be able to react and interact with the audience. Also interaction between members of the band while playing a show is a condition to make the magic,” he said. “Or maybe we are just better with instruments than with drum machines?”
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