HOT CHIP (dj set) + OK GO (dj set) ft PSYCHO FLOWER MC at 1015 FOLSOM

Actions Panel

Ticket sales have ended

Pre-Sales have ended for this event but tickets WILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR. Please arrive early to ensure entry.

HOT CHIP (dj set) + OK GO (dj set) ft PSYCHO FLOWER MC at 1015 FOLSOM

By 1015 Folsom

Date and time

January 1, 2016 · 10pm - January 2, 2016 · 2am PST

Location

1015 Folsom St San Francisco, CA 94103

Refund Policy

No Refunds

Description

blasthaus & 1015 Folsom present the BLASTHAUS 20 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

HOT CHIP (dj set)
OK GO (dj set) ft PSYCHO FLOWER MC

WITH BLASTHAUS RESIDENTS:
NOLAN GRAY
GIRLS N BOOMBOXES
PLATURN
BLUFARM
ANALOG DISKO
+ MORE

Friday January 1st / 10pm - 2am / 21+



HOT CHIP

Facebook
Twitter
Soundcloud

If you’re looking for them, the clues are there in plain sight. Right there, in the glimmer and thump of opening track ‘Huarache Lights’, a looped mantra nails Hot Chip’s collective psyche six albums in. It’s simple but pensive:

“Replace us with the things that do the job better.”

It’s both a bold call to arms and a statement of nagging doubt. If they’ve been too long in the game, if they need replacing, somebody else better get on with it – and it better be good.

Alexis Taylor explains: “I was trying to capture the feeling of excitement I get when hearing Joe’s new music for the first time, and collaborating with him on it. Huarache Lights are some trainers I love – but in the song they’re a shorthand for something modern, something very London, and for the kind of escapism and fun of a Friday night at Plastic People – which is where we were heading to DJ when we were making that track. The record is about the excitement of choosing what you might wear, choosing which records you will play. But at the same time, it’s asking whether we as a band are getting old, whether people still care. The answer is meant to lie in the music.”

The questions ‘Huarache Lights’ posts should probably be asked by any band serious about facing the future. What do we mean fifteen years in? Is there a newer model waiting at the side of stage, readying to make us obsolete? And if there is, why do what’s expected of us anyway?

Such ideas sit at the heart of Why Make Sense?
It’s a Hot Chip album that restates the band’s intentions and redefines the very things that made them relevant in the first place. Its ten tracks shun modernist dancefloor tropes in order to flick through the dusty corners of the band’s teenage record collections, back when they were experimenting with music on primitive computer programmes. But the creative process behind this record could not have been more different to the one behind those early records like San Frandisco and Coming On Strong. Why Make Sense? represents the first time the Hot Chip live band has recorded together residentially (at the rural Angelic Studios). The core five-piece band of Alexis, Joe Goddard, Owen Clarke, Felix Martin and Al Doyle were augmented by their regular drummer Sarah Jones and multi-instrumentalist Rob Smoughton (a formidable live prospect who will this summer headline Green Man and Sonar festivals, having previously headlined such venues as the Hollywood Bowl).

Joe: “When we were recording, we were getting closer and closer to the sound we make on stage. That kind of freedom makes a massive difference to a few of the tracks on the album; to how the tracks grow. Our recording process has been slightly anachronistic. It’s kind of perverse. I guess a lot of the records that were an influence on the record were made in that way – with engineers and people that knew their craft. I guess I feel that that’s something that’s often missing from a lot of very modern records made on laptops in bedrooms.”

The result is a revelation. Alternately jarring and chaotic, pared back, thundering, then pulsating and gloriously mellifluous, the album confidently displays its influences: clattering analogue post-punk (‘Why Make Sense?’), Philly disco (‘Dark Night’), and outer-space acid dub (‘Easy To Get’). The crisp, snapping ’90s RnB of ‘Love Is The Future’ calls in guest spots from De La Soul’s Posdnuos and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside on vocals and arrangements respectively. The record even eschews Alexis’ vocals in favour of a carefully chosen sample (from the 1983 Sinnaman single ‘I Need You Now’) that adds huge clout to the emotionally charged core of the album, ‘Need You Now’

Alexis: “‘Need You Now’ is a bit different to anything I’ve previously written about – it’s about the bleak reality of living in a world where terrorism exists in such a visible way. The track isn’t trying to solve anything, it’s just a recognition of the fact that it’s there and we’re helpless against it. Hot Chip songs are usually about relationships – either my own or my relationship to the music we make... ‘Need You Now’ comes from a more pessimistic place. It’s an attempt to condense down that sense of helplessness you get watching the news.”
Condensing both lyrics and music was a key technique in the making of Why Make Sense? – an anti kitchen-sink approach that has been gestating in the years since In Our Heads.

Joe: “Musically we all had a desire to strip things right down, not overload it with parts. It relates back to the idea of actually being a band – maybe just one guitar part and one live drum part rather than multiple layers added. Musically, it was an effort to bring a real directness to our music, the kind you’d get on old RnB records… Hopefully stripping things back brings more funk to the tracks.”

Funk runs deep through Why Make Sense? The unmistakable strutting sound of the clavinet drives ‘Started Right’, transplanting 1970s Stevie Wonder into a futurist soul backdrop. Elsewhere, tracks are augmented by a talkbox that’s as much Roger Troutman as it is Todd Rundgren.

Alexis: “It’s impossible not to think of Stevie when you hear a clavinet being played. We’re always into exploring possibilities of new bits of gear that we maybe haven’t used before. The talkbox in the studio was just as inspiring. We spent a lot of time going back to the RnB records we were listening to from the ’90s… they were records that quested after a pared down funk sound… Michael McDonald, G Funk…”

Joe: “A lot of this comes from the feeling that the RnB that’s being made now is washed with these drifting clouds of reverb. Those sounds seem designed to hide the fact that a lot of the music it’s drifting across is shit. I think these songs are us saying, ‘This is our take on RnB’. You could relate it to a history of ‘blue eyed soul’ where there’s a disconnect between the music and the people making it. Driving round Putney in a Peugeot with the windows down, the music you’re passionate about might not reflect who you are. Maybe at this point in our career, we’ve accepted who we are and that’s being reflected in the music. Fuck it, we don’t make sense, we’re doing it anyway.”

It might not be an answer to the titular question but it does offer a strong a sense of purpose. A strength that sustains one of the most singular, innovative writing partnerships in British music, and ensures that one of the best live acts on the planet continues to hone a sound that’s unique and unarguable, a sound that translates from nightclubs to festival stages without compromise. And it hammers home the notion that on the strength of Why Make Sense? – an unarguable creative peak – no one has built a machine that can replace Hot Chip yet.

Hot Chip - Huarache Lights
Plays: 1,567,234




OK GO

Facebook
Twitter
Soundcloud

Formed as a quartet in Chicago in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles three years later, OK Go (Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka, Andy Ross) have spent their career in a steady state of transformation. The four songs of the all-new Upside Out EP represent the first preview of Hungry Ghosts, due out in the fall on the band’s own Paracadute. This is the band’s fourth full-length and the newest addition to a curriculum vitae filled with experimentation in a variety of mediums.

The band worked with longtime producer and friend Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Weezer, MGMT), while also enlisting a new collaborator in Los Angeles, veteran Tony Hoffer, (Beck, Phoenix, Foster the People) to create their most comfortable and far-reaching songs yet. Building on (and deconstructing) 15 years of pop-rock smarts, musical friendship, and band-of-the-future innovations the EP, Upside Out, offers a concise overview of forthcoming Hungry Ghosts’ melancholic fireworks (“The Writing’s on the Wall”), basement funk parties (“Turn Up The Radio”), IMAX-sized choruses (“The One Moment”), and space-age dance floor bangers (“I Won’t Let You Down”).

Drawn from the same marching orders issued to big-hearted happiness creators as Queen, T. Rex, The Cars or Cheap Trick, and a lifetime of mixed tapes exchanged by lifelong music fans, Upside Out is a reaffirmation of the sounds and ideas that brought the band together in the first place. The four songs provide an assured kick-off to a new sequence of interconnected performances, videos, dances, and wild, undreamt fun.

“As the band has evolved over the last 15 years, the creative palette we work with has expanded in so many unexpected and gratifying directions,” says frontman Damian Kulash. “This record feels like it’s the musical manifestation of that — like we can speak in a clearer voice when we are playing in a bigger sandbox. Just as the band’s whole project became clearer to us as we learned to find more homes for our creativity — we triangulated it from more directions. And, I think the music itself has gotten more focused for similar reasons. We went in with fewer preconceptions of who we are or what our sound is, and came out with a record that sounds much more uniquely our own because of it.”

Continuing a career that includes viral videos, New York Times op-eds, a major label split and the establishment of a DIY trans-media mini-empire, collaborations with pioneering dance companies and tech giants, animators and Muppets, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved.

OK Go - I Won't Let You Down
Plays: 25,374,168




Tickets:
After purchasing a ticket through Eventbrite, you will receive an email with your tickets attached as a PDF. Please PRINT out your tickets and bring them with you on the night of the event. By purchasing a ticket you agree to receive periodic email communication from 1015 Folsom. Presale tickets must be redeemed by 1:30am.

All events are 21+ | Please bring valid identification | NO REFUNDS

Organized by

Sales Ended