Pitchfork

Photos by Frank Hamilton

On a good day, it's about a four hour drive from Baltimore to Brooklyn, and a soundtrack of James Brown's Star Time box set seemed like the perfect prelude to 77 Boadrum. Brown's endless, yelping variations on "give the drummer some" felt like prep work for absorbing the spectacle of 77 drummers, whatever they might end up playing. And "spectacle" proved an insufficient noun, with the nearly two hour performance that mystically celebrated 7/7/07 quickly becoming the stuff of dropped jaws, stolen breath, and "damn, you shoulda been there" urban legend.





Sets by Gang Gang Dance (a DJ mix of keening space voices stretching across a range of ethnicities, plus some pretty banging dancehall), Soft Circle (Hisham Bharoocha, the day's benefactor, doing his 'luuded solo tribal drum/keening space voice thing), and First Nation (avant-rock ladies missed while in line for the porta-potty) were like bite-sized appetizers for the 77 course meal: drummers from across the spectrum of underground notoriety/technical ability/genre formed in a spiral on the grass, moving outward from a riser in the center where the Boredoms conducted. The park hardly looked filled to capacity, despite the lines of frustrated people left stranded outside when the gates were closed, and it did lend the world's most ecstatic punk drum circle a certain intimacy. Like, hey, I'm inches from Brian Chippendale's ass.



Now anyone who's been in a school orchestra knows that gathering more than 20 instruments together, especially the same instrument, can easily induce a certain sense of awe. And portions of 77 Boadrum did indeed go beyond left-brain comprehension, the massive sound of that many percussionists scattering all errant thoughts from your head. If you've never heard 77 people lock into a unison THUMP-THUMP or begin frenziedly bashing like 77 free jazz bands arguing their way through a drum clinic, well, you feel it as much in the viscera as in the ear canal. When Boredoms guru Eye began mixing in noises like spaceships lifting off, it felt almost superfluous given the volume of the drumming. Did we mention that no one looked to be mic'ed up other than the four Boredoms?





Still, this was music, not a special effects demonstration. And after your ears and eyes adjusted, 77 Boadrum settled, if that's the right word, into one of the most epic variations yet on the motorik/poly-percussive sound the Boredoms have been chasing since Super Roots 7, if not before. Parts of the middle section sounded like Eye had assembled 77 clones of Neu!'s Klaus Dinger, all cranking out barely perceptible variations on an massive, unison beat that could probably be heard for blocks. (Indeed, many of those barred from entry, thanks to this free show being overbooked and the police unceremoniously shutting the line down before full-capacity was reached, watched from the bridge or listened from the street.)" In place of the electronic balls Eye has been using in recent years to trigger his noises, and in keeping with the percussive slant of the day, he played two electronically rigged-up racks of severed guitar necks by striking them with colored sticks and even a small trident, like a dreadlocked Neptune guiding his serpentine ensemble.









As the drummers roiled and Eye conjured surging riffs seemingly from the air, the group locked into a groove that inspired groups of dancers around the park to form little rave circles on the gravel, but as it eased past the hour mark, the set was destined to end as it began, with a shimmering decrescendo of cymbal that snaked around the spiral, only to crest back again for a climactic vocal duet between Eye and Yoshimi. Referencing everything from the punk-primitive call-and-response of Chocolate Synthesizer to the eighty-foot-high tribal-funk drumming of Super AE, 77 Boadrum made a bricolage of all the Boredoms best bits that exploded the idea of pastiche through sheer scale. If you missed it, pick up the eventual DVD. Or just hope and pray that they actually go through with whatever they've got planned for 8/8/08.