Live Human, DJ Badrok & Mountain Con

As local hip-hopper Thug E. Fresh played old school and underground hip-hop to the scant few in attendance at last Wednesday’s Live Human show, things looked grim. The turnout was feeble, a crowd the size of which makes touring artists want to bypass Chico all together. Upstairs, the bartender was doing her homework when she wasn’t serving drinks, and the bouncers strolled aimlessly through the club, picking up random glasses and pretty much taking it easy. It was an especially slow night.

When Seattle’s Mountain Con took the stage, they were faced with the prospect of playing to an empty dance floor and, in true indie rock fashion, accepted the challenge, and presented those few who were paying attention with a short set of rock numbers steeped in that post-Beck / Blues Explosion sound. One patron was overheard describing the band as "an indie rock Dave Matthews Band." While the music isn’t exactly like that of DMB, the description’s not that far off the mark. Mountain Con’s frontman sang heartfelt — though barely audible — lyrics, as he thoughtfully, nay pensively strummed an acoustic guitar. The grinning bass player bobbed in synch with his usually bouncy bass lines, over which a lap and slide guitar player laid the metallic croon of his instruments. There was also a keyboard player, a guy who ran one turntable (the records moved, but I never heard the scratchin’), a drum machine and a keyboard-interfaced sampler, and a drummer who wasn’t very good — or just starting out — which may be why he played every song to the same beat that was being kicked by the DJ’s beat machine. The result of all this instrumentation was a heavily muddied sound. The band and the crowd, such as it was, could only take each other for a half-hour.

Thug E. Fresh to the rescue: another set of old-school and underground faves filled the room as DJ Badrok set up his rig. Once in position, the Vestax-sponsored DJ battle champion laid down a nice set of mixed old school jams and furious scratching, proving once again why he is the revered and respected man of the steel wheels that he is. He didn’t bust out with anything he’s become known for around town — namely his "Mary Mary" routine — but he did get out some new tracks, including one session in which he juggled the same spaced-out bass bomb on both tables, each increasing in tempo just slightly as he worked back and forth, ending with a crescendo of lightning-quick and funky scratching. Badrok never disappoints.

Live Human’s DJ Quest swung a large card table on to the stage and began sound-checking his turntables with a short routine by a friend who was with the crew. We weren’t treated to a set featuring both Badrok and Quest, but that was okay, because as soon as Live Human started to rock it, that’s where the focus of the evening went in its entirety.

Live Human is a Bay Area trio, creators of music that can’t be easily described. The construct is as follows: DJ Quest on the 1’s and 2’s, Andrew Kushin on the stand-up bass and Albert Mathias on the drums. It’s a minimalist approach to the DJ-meets-live band concept, with the bass and drums providing the live instrumentation that often serves as a backdrop for the scratching and sampling turntable turns of Quest. The group tore through a set that featured some of the most innovative and impressive live music to hit this scene since the one-man sound factory known as That One Guy first made his presence known in these parts a few years back.

The hip-hop and jazz fusion trio pulled out some songs from their latest record, Elefish Jellyphant (Matador Records) as well as some gems I recognized from the previous Live Human recording, Monostereosis, though the songs seemed to have mutated from the original forms. But that’s the beauty of Live Human — their ability to work with a song and evolve it as it grows in age keeps the music always fresh and it also shows the inherent ability of the group to constantly explore their musical boundaries. The small audience — by rough count, not more than 50 very lucky people — was a boisterous group, providing ample hype after each song and at the show’s end.

The only drag about last week’s Live Human was the pathetic turnout. It was, as a show-goer pointed out at the end of the night, the best show in Chico no one ever saw.

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