April 15, 2001

The Waves jam begins as dub-tinged trance. It enters a kind of breakbeat theme after a few minutes, breaking down and finally settling into a steady trance jam as it heads towards Run Like Hell. Great start to the show. Run Like Hell has a drawn-out, Barber-led thematic mid-verse jam. The jam out features Magner on a dissonant trance synth, and builds to a typical Run Like Hell crescendo before breaking down into a Lai intro. Lai is standard. The Stone > Waltz pairing appears next, and is standard as well. The first set of three closes with a straightforward, and very short, Helicopters.

The second set opens, on paper, with Floodlights > Voices > Spacebird; however, both of these segues are essentially drop segues, so it’s not quite as exciting as one would hope. The Floodlights is a pretty standard version, very Barber-dominated with Magner mostly doing that record scratch effect. It is finished, and drop segues into a Voices intro. Voices has a jam, but it’s shorter and less interesting than the great fall 2000 versions. The ending ambience settles into a Spacebird intro. Like the other songs in this segment, the Spacebird is over before it can explore any interesting territory. The Ladies isn’t exactly groundbreaking either, but it is at least drawn out, and it explores an interesting theme in a satisfying way. It builds to a strong peak, although the return to the ending is a bit abrupt. A nice jolt to a relatively torpid set. The spring 01 juggernaut Very Moon follows. The first jam gets off to an orchestral start. It doesn’t get as exploratory as some, but it has a well-explored and distinctly melancholy theme over the still firmly type one rhythm. The funk jam has a hypnotic trance theme even before it leaves Moon funk territory. It moves into a tense, bass-heavy passage (seriously, Brownstein is fantastic here) with Magner on the flute patch, which settles smoothly into Nughuffer. Nughuffer is an excellent version (though of course nowhere near the same level as the previous week’s version). It’s a steady build around a sinister repetitive theme, which builds to a powerful, Barber-dominated crescendo.

Mulberry’s Dream is a standard version, though slightly longer than usual. Ape is played in the dub style again, and it doesn’t do much for me, but Magner’s theme is pretty catchy. The jam doesn’t evolve much, and segues into a “dub” version of I-Man. Woof. Glad they only attempted this once. Each of the three verses sounds completely different, and the chorus is played in dub style once and then standard next. Nevertheless, this is the first “dub” perfume version of any song, as the better known Dublights and Dub Dribble would debut the following week. The first jam is almost non-existent; the second is longer than usual but standard otherwise. The outro jam settles back into dub immediately, moving from a cool groove theme into a passage of Hope intro jamming, before finally making the return to Ape. I get what they were going for here, but the dub stuff can be such a crutch if it isn’t inspired (and it isn’t here, IMO). Story is a fist pumping trance jam. I expected it to return to be unfinished, but it is played in full and has a brief outro to RLH.

2/5. The Very Moon > Nughuffer is the easy highlight, and Waves > RLH > Lai is strong all-around. However, there is a LOT of filler—particularly in the third set.

Stray Observations: There are Very Moon teases in the Lai intro. In the Nughuffer story, Brownie contradicts everything he said in the previous story, saying he got carried away on his birthday. There are Hope teases in the I-Man outro.