Tuesday, February 10th 2009
Shows: 8mm
Antiquiet Loves You Too!
This past Saturday, we threw a little Valentine’s Day party at Enjoy Human’s studio in East Los Angeles. Despite the distance, and the rare LA rain that usually shuts the whole city down, you came out and packed the place to capacity. And we love you for it, because we poured our heart and soul into the event. I’ve been told by many people that it was the best party thrown in this town in a long time, and we’re thrilled to be able to call it success.
Granted, we kinda fucked up the free food part. I’m sure a few of you were pissed about that- it was there apparently, but even I never saw it. And then there was that brief power outtage during Pop Levi’s set- no, that wasn’t planned- but he rolled with it and spun it into rock n’ roll magic, didn’t he? And how sexy was 8mm? We’re going to be putting some beautiful video footage of their performance up here soon.
Here’s how it all went down: Despite the stage still being in pieces, the lights being on the ground, and the soundboard being in my apartment as of Saturday morning, we hustled everything together and opened doors at 7PM sharp as DJs Cody & Ian spun some fun old school rock & hip-hop courtesy of Grn Appletree.
Pop Levi went on at 9PM- we pushed him back just a bit to make sure enough people made it in through the rain & traffic. The sound was great, and the already large crowd was digging his high-energy set. We were running around, making sure everyone was taken care of, when suddenly, as Pop’s band was heading into a breakdown, everything went black. The power had gone out in the entire place, with one miraculous exception- the one circuit that all the bands’ amps were plugged into. Total chaos erupted- as the band continued playing, Pop went berzerk. He was screaming like a madman with his shirt off and his guitar face down on the stage. I was a little busy shitting myself, trying to get the sound system back online, and the hard drives that we were recording everything to repaired. But the crowd was eating it up.
Afterwards I went back to apologize, and everyone looked at me like I was crazy. I got handshakes and pats on the back. Go figure.
Cody & Ian got back on the decks as COLLABO set up their projectors and the place continued to fill up. 8mm took the stage sometime in between 10:30 and 11- we decided to wait for a bus to arrive from Manhattan Beach with 50 more people. By that time we had also gotten the sound system back to full operation, and located a missing video camera, and so Juliette & company delivered a beautiful performance without incident or technical difficulty. They closed with two songs written by crazy bitches- PJ Harvey’s Long Snake Moan and Jackie O by Sinéad O’Connor.
After 8mm, COLLABO flipped the switch and brought their crazy live visual show to the venue walls as DJ Dirty Dave took over on the decks. I had to start packing up my sound rig at 2AM, but LA wanted to keep going. So someone found an extra PA speaker, plugged an iPod into it, and the party was still going strong when Antiquiet headed out of there at 3.
So as we’re all still recovering and picking up the pieces, we’d like to share these photos with you, and thank you all once again from the bottom of our hearts for coming out. Special thanks to Enjoy Human for hosting and filming. Happy birthday to Enjoy Human co-founder Jeremie Brilliant! Thanks to Martín and Seth and Bud and all of the locals that came out to help us build the stage and hang the lights. Big thanks to Alex for helping me with the live sound. Thanks to Preston Thalindroma for coming out and taking so many great photos. Many many many thanks to Juliette Beavan of 8mm for helping with everything from distributing flyers to bringing in the lighting designer from A Perfect Circle’s 2003 tour to help us set the mood. And thanks to Pop Levi for turning a potential disaster into the kind of moments us music addicts live for, and sticking around long enough to shoot an interview we’ll have up here sometime soon. Happy Valentine’s Day!
I lost my damn bottle of wine! But besides that it was a blast. Thanks to everyone who showed up.
Insanity. Thanks guys for helping put this event together. A lot of stories from this!
Bitchen’ party, I drank lots of Pabst, met a vampire and even ran into a few old friends!
how did I miss the vampire!??! you would think a vampire would be easy to spot in that crowd of hipsters…
The vampire was in the downstairs restroom sniffing coke off of a filthy urinal that has probably never been cleaned. Blood is apparently passe. As for the free food, I saw a couple of hipsters that had tacos and wouldn’t tell me where they got them from. Fuck you, taco hoarding hipsters!
it done kicked ass. i think i’m going to fail my drug test from all that smoke, but damn it did smell good. 98.7 was there unfortunately (not like they’d give any of those bands any airplay (RIP indie)).
Wish I were There. 8mm is the best band i have found through the internet. 8mm’s Juliette, Sean & Jon broke the Internet into pieces; somebody needed to do that, and for this reason alone 8mm wins the Award: “Best Band to Break the Net”
RanDallk
That show was a complete waste of time. The location was a shithole…c’mon there was a port-a-potty out front. The line for drinks was awful and the crowd was talking so loud you couldn’t hear 8mm at all. Not to mention the fact that right when they were going to start everyone in the lot across the way had to move their cars. Not bad if you want to hang out in a dumpy building with your friends for the night but totally sucked if you were actually there to see the show.
come on, there was also two bathrooms inside. the parking lot sitch went bogus, and asses have been kicked over that. but 8mm sounded great to me, and were the highlight of my night personally. i’m going through footage right now and i don’t think anyone’s going to complain about the quality when the clips go up here. stay tuned.
don’t get me wrong though- defense aside, i’m very sorry you didn’t have a blast. we did the best we could, and the few mistakes we did make won’t be made again. promise.
I had an absolute blast.