The Biggest Hippie Drum Circle Outside of Burning Man
It was a fine summer’s day, clear and sunny, quite a change from the grey and rainy crappiness of the 4th of July. Chris had been obsessed with seeing this Boredoms concert for months, but it wasn’t until the day of that I opted to attend, as I had been planning on seeing the Built to Spill/Cat Power show at McCarren pool (see Liz’s review). The buzz about this mysterious live art happening of sorts had become deafening over the last couple of weeks, with every hip newspaper and blog in town wetting themselves over the whole thing, and eventually I gave in to my curiosity, and since I’d already seen both Built to Spill and Cat Power live in concert, I decided that I had to see what 77 drummers looked like.
The basic idea is that the Japanese experimental band Boredoms, which is usually not my cup of tea with their hard-to-listen-to noisy style of music, decided to enlist 77 volunteer drummers to play 77 drum kits. The drums would be arranged in a spiral pattern, with lead singer Yamataka Eye inhabiting the zero spot in the center. The only drummer whose name I recognized on the roster was the lovable Andrew W.K., but many of them are in prominent bands of various genres. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the terrain, on a grassy expanse of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, it was kind of hard to see what was going on, so I never did catch a glimpse of Mr. W.K., which is a shame, because he seems like a guy who likes to party, and I respect that.
The most notable thing about the show besides the spectacle itself was the line to get in. It literally stretched halfway across DUMBO. Chris and I showed up a half hour after people were officially allowed to start lining up, and it was already looking hopelessly long, but we decided to wait anyway, and not ten minutes after we took our places, the line had already stretched five more blocks behind us, and it continued to stretch for hours. We ended up waiting from around 3pm to 6pm, which sucked due to the heat, our aching feet, and the endless barrage of hipster douchebags. We amused ourselves by making fun of the hideous outfits and haircuts and outrageously tight pants that paraded by us. Manorexia was in the air, as was a complete disregard for proper beard maintenance. Yuck. This nerdy guy in front of us was carrying this little Casio keyboard, and he kept playing the damn thing like he thought he was special and ironically hilarious, but really he just looked like an asshole. Then one of his nerd friends vomited up his Snapple fruit punch, probably because he’d eaten some mushrooms or something (plenty of people were tripping out, and with good cause). At one point, to alleviate my boredom, I made a run to Jacques Torres, the gourmet chocolaterie, for some of their Frozen Hot Chocolate, which I’d never had but which was chocolatastic. And then we waited some more.
Finally we got into that weird abandoned armory-looking building, where the line ended and where there were some expensive food and drink stands set up, and proceeded to stand in another line, this time for the bathroom. They had these fancy, trailer-style port-o-potty things, but I wasn’t about to mess with none of that. Instead I opted for the real bathroom, and was richly rewarded by such amenities as running water.
Finally we were able to make our way over to the grassy knoll where the 77 drums were set up with a mini-stage in the middle for Mr. Eye. A couple of kids had apparently jumped a fence to bypass the line and enter the concert area, and we watched as they were tackled by rent-a-cops assisted by a real cop, all of whom used what looked to us concertgoers like way more force than was necessary. But they’re cops, what do you expect, I figured. Way more people had turned out for the event than could fit in the park, so what looked like hundreds of others had gathered on the Brooklyn Bridge to get an overhead view, which may have been a better choice, considering how hard it was to see what was going on from the ground. Luckily, the band had the audience sit down, which made it much more relaxing and viewable. They also allowed photographers to snap shots for the first seven minutes, easing up on the complete ban on cameras they’d requested on their website, but those greedy (and disrespectful) photographers just kept taking pictures throughout the whole show, like the assholes they are. Again, what can you do?
Finally, a little later than 7pm on the dot as planned (to fit with the 77 drummers on 7-7-07 theme), the concert began, and boy was it trippy. It really was a hippie drum circle to the extreme, like what I’d expect Burning Man to resemble. The charismatic nature of bandleader Eye made it all come together, as he rocked out on the keyboard playing weird synthesized shit and made weird echoey sounds with his versatile voice (assisted by some crazy distortion). He had this rack of electric guitar necks, tuned to different chords (and retuned throughout the show for different songs), which he would play by striking the necks with sticks. He also conducted the drummers, who played semi-composed patterns and arrangements, many of which involved starting a sound at the center of the spiral and moving outward one drummer at a time, and later reversing back to silence at the center (in a sense making Eye the eye of the storm…whoa). The highlight of the show for me was when Eye conducted the drummers animatedly and had them utilize cymbals (and some of his synthesized sounds) to evoke the sound of rising and falling ocean waves. Considering the location, on the shore of Brooklyn between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, facing an expansive view of the Manhattan skyline, it was a very appropriate choice, and everyone seemed to dig it. At other times the drumming got sort of jammy and tribal for my tastes, but it was still enjoyable and interesting to ponder. You see, there’s a whole crazy theory behind the whole thing. Read on for Mr. Eye’s explanation of what 77BOADRUM means from his point of view:
“THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 7
Words by Yamataka Eye
If I start thinking about 7, it sticks in my head. Doesn’t go away. I love 7 as a number. I think it’s so mysterious.
7 is attractive. I think everybody has some impression of 7.
77 DRUM: It’s a quite primitive concept. It’s related to where Japanese people came from. There is a river called Amur River, in Russia. Amur River is huge, gigantic river, almost like sea. We Japanese come from the north of the river.
North means above, above means cosmic. If you go further up in space, there is a river. A river of stars in heaven. We came from this place. Japanese people have an idea of this subconsciously.
Amur sounds like the Japanese word ‘Ama.’ Ama means sky, cosmos, the universe. We see the Milky Way as a river of stars, we imagine it’s like a river in the sky.
In Japan, we have the Star Festival on July 7. It is the middle of the rainy season. If we get lucky, we can see Milky Way in clear sky. Every Japanese person knows a romantic myth related to July 7.
July 7 is supposed to be only day in the year you can see two stars on each edge of the Milky Way. People think one side as a girl, other side as a boy, and they are meant to be a couple. They can only see each other, once a year, on July 7, by crossing Milky Way. Where did that myth come from? It came our Japanese ancestors who lived near the sacred Amur River.
The original inhabitants of Japan had a philosophy called Animism, which believes there are numerous gods in nature. They worshiped the gods in nature. I feel sympathy for that way of thinking.
The people coming from Amur were the opposite, rather powerful and systematic. As new settlers the Amur people needed to get along with original inhabitants, so they declared themselves messengers from the sun, messengers of Amaterasu, the sun god. The Japanese people today came from Amaterasu. We come from the sun.
7 is the number when we try to express sun as sound. When I glance at the sun, I see number 7. ”
That totally blew my mind. Anyway, check out the following website for a map of the drum circle and a list of the drummers who volunteered their time to pull of this one-time-only event. Well done, you crazy kids.
Official Website: http://www.viceland.com/77BOADRUM
More information about Boredoms: http://www.viceland.com/77info/
