Treasure Island Music Festival: Day 1 (slideshow)

October 20, 9:56 PMCulture & Events ExaminerRick Marianetti

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Audience watching Passion Pit.
Rick Marianetti

Thirteen hip hop and electronica-influenced ensembles, along with muralists, intergalactic creatures, and a golf-cart disguised as a cupcake, transformed San Francisco's Treasure Island into a testosterone-fueled, computer-assisted performance art festival of music and light for 10 hours on Saturday.

A ten thousand strong sold-out crowd watched, listened, danced, melded, and jumped up and down like bacchanalian cosmonauts on invisible pogo sticks to the relentlessly rhythmic stylings of mostly male artists.

Impressions
Hip hop artist Murs wasn't just whistlin' Dixie when he rapped, "Blonde girls, Black girls, Asian girls, whatever / I never met a girl that I didn't like ever." While his between-song patter mirrored Will Rogers claim of never meeting “a man (woman) I didn't like," I’m inclined to believe Murs and Rogers weren’t referring to the same gestalt of emotions with the word "like."

DJ Krush unleashed an engaging drum and bass sound sculpture, sampling church bells and the Eagles’ "Hotel California" over an uproarious percussion of bass beats dissolving into buzz synth accented by snippets of Miles Davis' acoustic trumpet.

One of the few female performers of the day was vocalist Sabina Sciubba of the Brazilian Girls, although the plural is misleading because Sciubba is the only woman in the trio (and BTW, nobody in the band is from Brazil). Donning fishnet stockings and a way-oversized red heart on her chest, the Italian-born Sciubba sang in a variety of styles, exuding a sexualized punk-irony as she sang a lyric informing her partner to keep on keepin’ on because she was oh so close to orgasm.

Girl Talk is actually a one-man laptop band whose parents saddled him with the less intriguing name of Gregg Gilliswove. Strobe lights ignited his spiraling synth patterns over heavy bass lines, sounding like music meant to accompany colliding galaxies. The audience responded like parishioners at a touched-by-the-holy-ghost Baptist revival meeting. Scores of celebrants took to the stage dancing as Mr. Girl Talk stood on an amplifier shouting, "We are one" while air-powered bazookas shot streams of toilet paper into the chilled night air.

MGMT finished the evening in front of an extravagant, computer-generated video screen, alternating shots of audience and stage in real time.

In a recent interview in Beirut (the capital of Lebanon, the the music group that performed on day 2 of the TIMF), Godfather/Apocalypse Now director Francis Coppola said the cinema is going to become something more interactive, like a live performance. In the future, the filmmaker will be onsite, like an opera conductor.

The future is now.

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Next Generation by day, piano extravaganza by night--Monterey Jazz Festival: Day 3

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Photos: Rick Marianetti