the orb playing walt disney concert hall

the rock star lifestyle part 34: after staying out most of the night for the spring all night dance celebration, hmc and i rousted ourselves to fly down to lost angels, checked into the stodgy hilton checkers and then went to see the orb play the walt disney concert hall at midnight.

it ended up being an honest-to-god all night concert in the exact same auditorium, that the very respectable la phil plays in during the day, only dntel started playing at midnight, then boom bip at 1, and john tejada at 2. i love boom bip albums, and was a little suprised at how “rock” they sounded, complete with guitars and drums and the whole shebang. john tejada was just out and out amazing. layers and layers and layers of intricate detroit techno, bleeps and blips all tumbling on top of one another.

as for the orb, they came on at 3am and played a three hour set that was really incredible. just wonderful and delicious and mindblowing. all the favorites mixing into the newer stuff and bubbling out and around. i’m sure the chemical enhancements didn’t hurt either. this may have overtaken my previous favorite concert performance by them, way back over a decade ago at organic (proto-coachella!).

the gucci twins left an hour into the orb, and paula stayed for at least another hour, but hmc stuck it out for the whole thing. pretty great.

and how’s seeing them in a concert hall? it’s kind of funny, because while you don’t have assigned seats, you’re in a section and you’re probably sitting in a seat in that section anyway. so you can stand up and dance a little, but it’s not necessarily conducive to real bootyshaking. yet the fact that the acoustics are so incredibly perfect, allowing you to hear every little nuance of their music, ends up giving you an incredible experience: clarity of music but with the energy of live performance (again, let’s not dwell on merits of live performance of electronic music, etc.).

as we stumbled out in the la dawn, all the streets downtown were blocked off and there were people running around. it turns out that the la marathon was that morning as well. (suddenly, it explains the extreme difficulty in getting a hotel room downtown for that night!) if we had only known, we could have just rolled right into that as well.

uh, right.

Posted at March 19, 2006 8:36 AM