Memory Tapes @ Doug Fir for the first time in PDX

Last Wednesday night, a whiskey sour in hand and my wrists inky with stamps of various woodland creatures, I grooved to Memory Tapes as they played at the Doug Fir Lounge for the first time in Portland.  I say ‘they’ because it was not only Dayve hawk, the one man behind Memory Tapes and other projects such as Memory Cassette and Weird Tapes, but a bass player and percussionist backing him as well. Much to my surprise, they played a live show which sounded, to me, only distantly like the highly produced chillwave loops I was used to from his first album “seek magic”. Live, the sound was definitely funkier, quite bass heavy, and initially it was hard to identify each song with the tracks from his records. The familiar hook lines and beats in the background eventually clued me in, and overall the sound wasn’t unpleasant, only the show might have appealed more to a crowd looking to rock out rather than the dj set I was looking forward to. They opened with a track off his just released album “player piano”, played a handful of songs from “seek magic”, and ended with the upbeat track “bicycle”, playing for about 45 minutes in all. Another element worth mentioning were the crazy lights, which saturated the backdrop and players on stage with vivid patterns ranging from Indian rug and kaleidoscope, to something akin to the old OMNIMAX theatre intro of the  psychedelically colored tunnel through space. In all, an interesting show. Not exactly what I expected, but I still bought his LP. 

Margot Denman

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 26th, 2011 at 12:31 am. It is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.