I was wondering why the Black Keys the night before had failed to move me, but now I remember: there are two kinds of garage rock, just like there’s a difference between modern country and roots country. And though I shudder at talk of “authenticity” in music, because it’s usually code for hating the kids with their new-fangled contraptions, there’s no argument that there’s something irreproducible in the sound of the Black Lips. And the Black Keys are one word and one world away from it.

“I want to thank you for all the things you’ve done to your body,” Cole Alexander told the melatonin-starved space cadets in the audience as they jumped into “Dirty Hands,” a bizarro-world Beatles number. Then they moved on to “Oh Katrina,” that New Orleans epic, with pure Back from the Grave fuzz, and screams like Zachary Thax, almost approaching the screaming, Peruvian, coca-leaf tea insanity of 60’s Lima rockers Los Saicos.

And the Black Lips kept going on, moving from country-esque rockers to full LSD-echo vocals, with lyrics about blood and dumpster diving. My favorite tune may have been the one from the upcoming album, “Time,” a surprisingly hopeful number that reminded me a bit of a David Johansen-penned tune. But being Coachella, Alexander couldn’t resist ending with a golden oldie, i.e. taking off his pants and beating his instrument with his implement.

But I missed the meat myself, because I’d gone next door to the Gobi tent to catch fIREHOSE, where Mike Watt was slapping his bass with his erect fingers. For some slightly older gentlemen who’ve been broken up for the lifetimes of most Coachella patrons, fIREHOSE jammed pretty econo. Ed Crawford may look a bit like the “Life Is a Highway” guy nowadays, but his lyrics of pain and heartache made this less of what fIREHOSE is known for—being a continuation of the Minutemen—and more of a force on its own. As post-Minutemen projects go, I must say I prefer Mike Watt’s Secondmen, or even Dos, to the funk-rock of fIREHOSE. But it’s nice to see Watt backing up someone like Crawford, whose bright guitar noodling had an almost country flair.

They were, however, nowhere close to being a match for the Buzzcocks. What bandcould have been? Even Coachella’s schmoozing celebrities left the netherworld of the backstage trailers and ventured out to watch the action, like rats following the scent of a luxurious limburger. Tim Roth in the gated guest area politely let friendly photographers snap his photo, and Dylan McDermott let me know his favorite Buzzcocks song was “Ever Fallen in Love.” He was nice, though I wish his big noggin wasn’t blocking my every damn photo!

Of the remaining two Buzzcocks still playing out, Pete Shelley really looks his age, whereas Steve Diggle is youthful, gleeful, spasmodic, mod-looking; basically, he’s become the Flavor Flav to Shelley’s Chuck D. True, Diggle looked a bit like Roman Polanski when he smiled, and his windmill guitar riffs were completely Pete Townsend. But there was no imitation in the uproarious crunch he brought to his guitar with every sweep across the strings. He was jumping up on things, and pointing at the crowd, running back and forth into the light, all the while Shelley intoned his songs as lively as ever: “Fast Cars,” “Autonomy,” and even the post-Buzzcocks hit “Homosapien”—not sure if it was as good as the Big Dipper version on the Freedom of Choice comp, but that’s just me being a child of the ‘90s.

And maybe that’s the secret of the Buzzcocks, that everyone who has ever liked punk rock or even been a teenager (well, at least a teenaged boy) has loved this band. There were folks in the audience old enough to be my dad, who were screaming along with glee, as well as youngsters from bands like Images, all on the sidelines chanting with every chorus.

Oh, the sentiments of Shelley’s songs! “I just want a lover like any other/what do I get? I only get sleepless nights, alone in my half-empty bed.” It was just as true at age 13 as it is at 35. And while that kind of sentiment could be sad, you can’t cry when you’re shouting “ohh-ohh” in unison with hundreds of people in the spring sunshine. It was a chorus as loud as a soccer chant, only topped when they followed it with “Promises” and its extra “ohh-ohh-ohh.”

After a palate cleansing trip to the Safari tent to hear the bass-heavy, four-on-the-floor Canadian electronic duo Zeds Dead, I checked out Squeeze at the Mojave. And I was late—got there juuuuust in time to catch “Up the Junction,” possibly the best pop song ever to imbue a narrative with a false ending. Though singer Glenn Tilbrook had grown General Custer’s beard (which also dangled a bit like Col. Sander’s bow tie), and I wished they could have talked Paul Carrack into reprising his vocal on “Tempted,” these guys sounded exactly the same as I imagine they would have in 1982. The timeslot was perfectly 80s, too, as the sun had just set, and the polo field palm trees behind them were lit up in neon colors that matched their evening jackets, like in a Miami Vice nightclub scene. There was a little weirdness here and there from keyboards that didn’t quite fit, but if awkward keyboards aren’t the Squeeze sound, I don’t know what is.

I’d thought that Squeeze would be a hard-sell for the Coachella crowd, with a demographic that seems to be 18-30, too young to remember Squeeze. Looking around me, I saw a lot of crows’ feet and tastefully covered middle-aged midriffs belonging to people who wouldn’t seem like a fit for Swedish House Mafia or Dr. Dre. And there were hundreds of them in the Mojave tent, hundreds of folks who knew all the words to “Pulling Muscles from a Shell” and “Goodbye Girl.” Were these the parents of the glow-stick panda-hat generation? Was the Squeeze show basically a concession to the old folks, like one of the karaoke bars open until 11 at a Disney Resort?

Then again, the Shins on the main stage were just as gentle and careful with their pop craftsmanship, and they were perfect for a festival like this, far more so than the huge spectacles we’ve been seeing on the main stage during the other nighttime slots. Whether you watched the Shins up close, or watched them projected on those big ol’ screens, or just wandered around trying to find a vegan hot dog near the main stage, the Shins’ music followed you, lovingly wrapping itself around your ears like your grandmother’s quilt on a cold night. (And it was cold. It fucking was. Fuck. This article is based on memory, because my fingers were too frozen to hold a pen. Damn Al Gore and his lies. Burn down the rainforests).

New member Jessica Dobson was the Shins’ secret weapon. Her guitar playing and stage presence, and of course her glowing vocal accompaniment, made this a special show unlike the songs as you’d hear them on the albums. And while you’d think the acoustics of a big show would be too boxy and bass-y for a gentle string-based band, they sounded great, with every string-scrape and knuckle-rap captured perfectly and presented to us like a little package. Even the flaws were charming. When singer James Mercer couldn’t quite hit the high notes on their big hit “New Slang,” it didn’t feel like he’d fooled us with a take-in-a-thousand, as Ween once had on “Freedom of ’76,” it felt like a chance to acknowledge our graciousness.

I wandered from the main stage to the Outdoor Theater to see Feist, expecting more of the same. But boy howdy, she’s expanded her band into a literal orchestra, one with glowy red things strapped to the guitars and instruments and various other doodads. Perhaps because this giant collection of musicians on horn and woodwind and string instruments and strange percussion (was that a leather chiminea?) didn’t have a true conductor, it sounded a little bit like high school, a collection of friends with instruments rather than an ensemble. In fact, some songs, like “the Bad in Each Other,” featured a kind of Bow Wow Wow, rim-tapping percussion that felt very much like a pep assembly. But that seemed fitting, as if Feist had taken her Sesame street appearance from a few years ago and gone full-tilt kid friendly.

Well, sorta: she still has the womanly, slightly dry alto voice that made her famous, the one that abruptly gets caught in mid vowel change, like even just talking is going to make her cry. This time out, a trio of female singers (I almost said “weird sisters”) flanked her, cooing with a knowing glance during every chorus. And the orchestra had a sheen of tenor and bass saxophones to fill out the bottom end with a nice devilish growl. But my favorite part was when she decided to rock out on “I Feel It All,” reducing the sound to the bare rock band components and leaving her 30-some-odd piece ensemble with nothing to do but clap their 60 hands.

It gave me an itch for more rhythmic music, and Flying Lotus at the Gobi tent was ready to serve it up. When I got there, he was holding court over hundreds of people as though it was nothing (because honestly, compared to Low End Theory, it really wasn’t). The glitch-hop godfather was in the zone, breaking off new beats every forty seconds or so, a bottle of Jameson next to him and his mike at the ready, not to rile the crowd up so much as to express his thoughts. “I know sometimes my stuff is deep and emotional. And sometimes it’s fucking crazy. But it’s always hard!”

Suddenly he announced Thundercat, the jazz bassist (who was scheduled for his own show on Sunday). Thundercat, a man after my own flamboyant heart, was wearing an animal mask as a skullcap, crazy Hawkman wings jutting out backwards on the sides of his head, and raccoon tails hanging in front of each ear. This crazed P-Funk era looking creature jumped on bass, and an amazing drummer (whose name is TBD) jumped onto a huge drum set, and what had just seconds before been a glitch-hop performance now became spooky jazz fusion, with Flying Lotus laying down some haunting synths over a smattering of blippy bass and bombastic drums.

“Raise your hands if you’re going to see Radiohead after this!” exclaimed FlyLo, but first I had to get away and check out a band I’d never seen, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who attracted less of an audience than they deserved just due to the timeslot preceding Radiohead. Their rock ensemble, with dark Americana tinges, played facing themselves, with no stage lights, with tattered black and white imagery behind them and the occasional clip of spoken-word sermons (maybe David Koresh?) breaking up their set, which moved me in ways I haven’t felt since my Cialis prescription came through.

Finally it was time to face the music and go see Radiohead. And while they were good, and Thom Yorke’s voice was in top shape, songs like the opener “Bloom” sounded best when they got tropical, reminding me almost, and this is odd, of the Growlers. Perhaps Radiohead is the Beatles of our time, or maybe they’re the U2, but this journalist would rather deal with bands than with cultural monuments. And so off I went to try and get some sleep, so I could enjoy more bands on Sunday.

-D. M. Collins

-Kristina Benson

TOKiMONSTA – Bright Shadows by BRAINFEEDER

Tokimonsta is a piano-student-turned-producer who makes beats for Brainfeeder. Her new Creature Dreams EP is out now and fans of her All City and Art Union releases will be happy to know that she picks up where she left off. Toki speaks now about girls, touring, and the danger of knowing too much. This interview by Kristina Benson.

You said you started listening to hip-hop because you grew up in Torrance and you didn’t want to be like the other kids.
The kids I grew up with were listening to Green Day and Blink-182 and stuff. I felt like there was more to music than that. When I found hip-hop—even at that point West Coast gangsta rap or New York rap or local underground hip-hop, like L.A. hip-hop—I found something that really spoke to me. That was an age where hip-hop didn’t have this weird hip-hop-pop fusion. Hip-hop was very much its own category, and not pop. It could get popular and not the same. I found it fascinating—it’s not even just the lyrics. When I listened to rap, I didn’t listen to the rhymes—just the cadence. Which is probably why I make beats. I liked the idea of instrumental music a lot. With early rap, you just heard how they could kind of rock the beat with their rhymes.
You said in another interview that you like things that are really chill or really angry. What’s missing from the middle?
I pull from really diverse things that are polar opposites. I think people feel like they have to maintain a certain consistency—like all their music should sound like one style and it should all sound the same. That’s not how I am. One minute I might listen to bossa nova, but I also love death metal or something random. With my music and taste, I suppose it’s just a matter of how that translates into my music, since I’m just a product of my influences. And my influences and who I am is like the calm and the crazy. There really is a middle but I draw from the opposites.
You said you were an ‘unfocused student of classical piano,’ but you stuck with it for ten years. Why?
That was by force. It wasn’t willingly so I don’t think I was a very good student. With my family, it’s a running joke that I couldn’t play a single song from beginning to end. That’s because when I like to play music, I actually only like to play the parts of the songs that I like. It’s like my early rudimentary form of sampling, I guess—only taking the parts I like and then playing them until my family went berserk on me.
But Mozart did that—he just called it ‘Variations on a Theme.’
I should bring that up to them! They always say, ‘You’re a musician now but you weren’t very good at playing piano!’ I try to kind of convince them there’s a reason why I played piano the way I did, but it doesn’t quite click with them.
What do you think you got out of piano lessons that you bring to your music now?
Musical sense and musicality. I have that music theory kind of ingrained into me. Because I had piano lessons, I’m able to translate my taste in music into actual musical notes. I kind of came from the hip-hop scene originally and most of the beatmakers I knew didn’t know how to play an instrument. They were just really good at doing the drumming and picking samples. I felt I had the opportunity to play more complex melodies, more layers. Maybe my music doesn’t have the razzle-dazzle and as many effects as some other people, you know, but it’s really technical—I kind of brought the technique to what I was playing instead.
Do you ever feel hindered by knowing so much theory?
It has definitely placed a box around how I approach music. I really taught myself not to be bound by the rules. There are things you’re taught that work and things you’re taught that don’t work. The inspiration I had was just from looking outside. I realized someone like Sun Ra—who can play very straightforward, very musical jazz—never felt obligated to theory. He went really out there and the stuff that came out was so meaningful. Even with my peers and friends and the people at Brainfeeder, it’s not like many of them took lessons and learned to play instruments. Except Austin Peralta. That’s different. You get more creative the less you know, so with people who never took piano or any kind of instrument as a kid, the way they approach music is really refreshing. They’re not just going the way they were taught because they were never taught a specific way.
Mary Anne Hobbs referred to you as one of her favorite ‘female producers,’ and I think every time I read something about you, it’s like this main point: She’s FEMALE and she MAKES BEATS! Does that get old?
It does get old pretty fast. The way that people referred to me was, ‘She’s a female beatmaker,’ but it’s not even that—then they go, ‘Oh she’s Asian,’ so it gets compounded. ‘She’s an Asian female beatmaker.’ It’s like, ‘Come on! I’m so much more than that!’ As a musician, you don’t want people to focus on superficial things—you want them to focus on the music, you know? I don’t want people to really get stuck on these really kitschy points. Who gives a fuck if I’m a girl? Who gives a fuck if I’m this or that? What matters is if the music is good or not. One thing good about this scene in particular is it’s not like any of us are plastered on TV where your fans rely on how you look. It’s kind of a faceless scene—unless you go out a lot, when are you ever going to see these artists? You realize people can’t rely on what you look like, so they have to rely on the music. I’ve had conversations about this with Steve [Ellison, a.k.a Flying Lotus]—about how it really bothers me that people want to find a theme and kind of run with it. Like with him: ‘Oh you’re Alice Coltrane’s grandnephew or whatever.’ But if something like that gets someone to say, ‘This sounds interesting—a female beatmaker? I’ll check it out!’ and that person likes it, I guess it’s not a bad thing. It could be a blessing in disguise. My whole career I’m sure I’ll just have to struggle to get people to focus more on the producer aspect and less on the female aspect.
Do you think it matters if there are other women in music?
I just don’t want to be stuck in a box and be about femininity and woman power and all that … the music matters the most. I guess it doesn’t matter, I suppose? If they want it to matter, that’s cool too because at least I know that some people will be more motivated by seeing me—a girl will be more motivated by seeing other female musicians. I know a few little girls that have spoken to me and are like, ‘How do you even get started making beats? How do you get into it?’ If they see I can do it, they might be motivated to try a little harder.
When I was an undergraduate, one of my voice teachers said to me that she quit singing opera professionally because she became a slave to her voice—her voice had become so important that she as a person wasn’t important anymore. Do you ever feel that way about music?
I’ve kind of come to terms with the fact that people don’t pay for music anymore so most of my income is from playing shows. It’s exhausting and I feel like I don’t exist when I’m on tour. It’s fun and not fun at the same time. On tour you kind of feel like you’re in limbo. I’m starting to get a little better at making tracks when I’m away. I feel like people glamorize it. ‘You get to go to all these foreign countries—travel!’ Yeah, but I don’t really get to look at anything! You meet a lot of really cool people—which is one good thing. And very inspiring.
How do you approach live sets? Is it different than what you put out as recordings?
When I play live I use Ableton and a controller and it’s like arranging music live. It’s more like live remixes of my own music. You pick and choose what you want to play—put one drum pattern onto a different song. The audience can feel more involved that way because being behind a laptop is kind of a cold visual aspect. I’ve done this live set so many times that I have it at a level where I can turn off the music and talk to the people in the audience. I did that at Low End Theory for my birthday. There was a couple that was dry-humping in front of me, and I called them out and poked fun.
Why does your music arouse such wanton sexual impulses in the audience?
I didn’t know my music brought this out of people. I’m still on that tip where I want people to relate to it more emotionally. To make people a little bit more sensitive to themselves. If they hear something and it makes them want to move, or that song makes them think, ‘This is what I want to listen to when I’m in love!’ or something like that … that would be more rewarding to me. Let’s put it this way: If the world ever gets underpopulated, I guess I could do my part to help.

TOKIMONSTA’S CREATURE DREAMS EP IS OUT NOW ON BRAINFEEDER. VISIT TOKIMONSTA AT TOKIMONSTA.COM.

Flying Lotus and Thom Yorke played surprise sets at Low End Theory on April 30, 2011. Gari Askew was in the building!

[View with PicLens]

Austin Peralta “Algiers”
(from Endless Planets out now on Brainfeeder)

Brainfeeder is a label of ever-expanding invention, the cosmic heir to the pioneering spirit of Impulse! Records and Strata-East. Like those jazz giants before them, Brainfeeder thrums with a collective energy, synthesizing each artist’s unique sound and story into a single, shared cosmology. To those reared only on squelching electronics, Austin Peralta’s Endless Planets must seem to exist somewhere out on the periphery of that universe: pure, instrumental jazz beyond even Ras_G’s solar-myth approach. Peralta picked up piano at age 5 and was already touring internationally while the rest of us were grappling with the intricacies of parallel parking. Endless Planets is the 20-year-old’s first album released stateside, and one that more readily recalls jazz history written by Charles Mingus and Max Roach than records spawned in the alternate reality of Madlib’s Yesterdays New Quintet. More often than not, Endless Planets laces up its desert boots and treads the same territory as McCoy Tyner’s Sahara, sandy winds blowing hot across “Capricornus” and “Algiers.” Peralta strikes with speed, fast-fingered flourishes bubbling up from the currents of “The Underwater Mountain Odyssey” and a sweet solo sapping “Ode to Love.” But Peralta also knows when to recede into the background of his band, which has the young, eminently talented Zane Musa on alto sax, Ben Wendel on tenor and soprano sax, Hamilton Price on bass and Zach Harmon on drums. There are celestial electronics courtesy of Strangeloop and the Cinematic Orchestra, too, but Endless Planets isn’t about bridging electronic music and jazz. For Peralta, and Brainfeeder, they’re one in the same.

—Miles Clements

I’d only been to Coachella once, in 2004, when the horse-flavored dust was hot enough to scorch my nostrils on its way to my lungs. By the end of the weekend, I was more than glad to leave: as my crew headed for the car on the last night, I got on my knees and pounded my fist in the dirt, screaming “NEVER AGAIN!!!!”

But time changes a lot of things, as does a free VIP wristband and a press pass. And so with a tinge of trepidation, I found myself in the early afternoon hours on Friday in a Coachella parking lot in Indio, California, loaning some of my precious sunscreen to a jeepload of bucking bros, who were slathering their muscular chests and explaining to me how to hide drugs when going through the guard checkpoints: socks could be checked, but probably not sacks. “Just put it in your underwear, next to your balls—last year they rolled down the elastic band of my boxers, but that’s the worst they’re gonna do.”

I headed in, and after two checkpoints, the first being suspiciously more laissez-faire than the final one (where my sack was only slightly brushed during a hearty leg-pat), I found myself within the Coachella grounds, which seemed peppier and less barren than I remembered them seven years before. There were T-shirt stands and help desks and water carts, but also more installation art and domes and carnival rides, extra little structures here and there where skin-saving patches of shade could be savored. It felt like they were making a stronger effort to get every dehydrated kids out of the sun and under a giant metal tarantula. The only thing there was less of was people—was attendance down this year, or had they somehow made progress on getting the lines shorter, the parking easier, and the hassles less hassly?

Excision by Dan Collins

Excision by Lainna Fader

But I didn’t question things as I rushed to the Safari tent to see the last dregs of Excision’s set, which was making the early Coachella crowd go apeshit with dancing, screaming, and adoration straight out of a church. This Canadian’s wobbly-based dubstep, spun from behind a giant desk/platform that would have looked good with Mao Tse Tung behind it, didn’t match the sunniness of the afternoon for me, so I was forced to wash him down with a $9 tequila sunrise at the adjacent VIP rose garden, and an $11 margarita at the VIP tent near the Coachella main stage, where Ozomatli were sounding exactly like what you’d expect them to sound like if you’ve ever heard fourteen seconds of their music at any point in their recorded history.

It was in the VIP lounge that I realized how different the Coachella experience would be with a press pass than how I’d spent it in proletarian misery seven years before. The big VIP area had a fountain, an air-conditioned tent bar, free wifi for the press, delicious Woodfire pizza, and close proximity to the main stage itself! Sure, you were still too far away to see the actual physical performance, but you could hold a drink while not seeing it. And anyway, despite the near-nudity and the “Adamandeve.com” banner being pulled behind a plane in the sky, Coachella is not exactly about the intimate experience.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0BbKAJ9c0I

Warpaint by Dan Collins

Perhaps because of that lack of intimacy, I craved seeing bands I was familiar with. So after a brief interview with YACHT, I headed over to the Outdoor stage, Coachella’s second largest, to see Warpaint. Margaret Wappler from the L.A. Times says they were dressed “like the shipwrecked daughters of a one-eyed pirate captain and Stevie Nicks” but aside from singer Emily Kokal’s amazing Sheila E. coat, the other members actually wore the kind of billowy nineties dresses you’d see models in Sassy wear circa 1992. They were great—Jenny Lee Lindberg on bass danced around and boogied it up with Stella Mozgawa on drums, and Kokal and guitarist Theresa Wayman more or less swapped singing duties every other song. Their pretty, dark wave, shoegazey-chimey-crunch worked great on a blistering spring afternoon, like sprinkles of cold water on your back. And maybe this is what Coachella’s alternate stages are best at—letting bands you’ve only heard on the radio wow you with how good they sound on a big stage, with a roaring crowd, clean vocals, and the natural lighting of the sun!

Ariel Pink by Lainna Fader

Ariel Pink by Lainna Fader

And all that Vitamin D was giving me a delicious energy, which I should have used to watch Cee Lo’s famed meltdown, but instead used to get to Ariel Pink early, at the Gobi stage. Aaah, a shady side tent, where the crowds were small and I could zip right on up to the photographer area in front of the stage. Drummer Aaron Sperske spotted me in my photographer’s perch and gave me a little “sup bro” head nod: it was an isolated moment of connection with a band in a weekend where the barriers between artist and audience were rigidly enforced. And that kind of isolation can lead to trouble—perhaps this is why Ariel Pink stormed off the stage, telling us that we must “hate” him, when in fact we were all really enjoying the souped-up Gary Numanisms on display, vocals and all. Ariel, I’m sure there were no monitors and a whole lot of ‘tude from the sound guy, but maybe you could have just rolled with it?

Same goes for Lauren Hill, who on the main Coachella stage had a tiny little tizzy about the sound that delayed her set uncomfortably close to the “will they pull the plug” threshold. But I liked that she dressed just like I would if I were a woman—hoop earrings, a funky knit hat under a second hat (trés Bartholomew Cubbins), and a stripey dress so big and billowy and protruding in the front that she’s just got to be pregnant again with her sixth kid.

Drunk with the power of my media wristband, I took a first saunter into the very front of the Coachella stage, only to have an authoritative white woman looked at my wristbands and tell me “You don’t have a photo wristband: you have to leave.” I walked out, sullen and confused, but not before I got a good glimpse of Ms. Hill’s hijinks close up, the way they look best. Though the big video screens on the sides of the stage captured her swagger, they did NOT capture her slight figure, her frail, crazed humanity, or the baby bump, which I repeat is DEFINITELY a baby on the way and not a trick of the light or media hyperbole. And it was a good listen: lively versions of Fugee and solo Hill songs bopped, booped, and poked out at us from the stage. Hill had a damned good backing band, with tubas as tight as the bass, and when they closed with “Doo Wop (That Thing),” I felt like maybe it was going to be a pretty cool weekend.

That feeling dissipated later, when I foolishly departed from Interpol’s sunset performance to check out Kele and Sleigh Bells. Really? Is this what the kids are into these days: anthemy showdown music with the most boring guitar punctuation in the history of power chord cheese, and vocals that were 45% just “Whooooaaaaaaaaah?”

Marina and the Diamonds at the Gobi stage were more entertaining. Though some of their actual recordings are rather overproduced (I doubt you’d ever play them in the car for your friends), the band had a real patchwork charm live, like Bjork trying to cover Annie Lennox while dressed in Josie Cotton’s outfits. Principal songwriter/performer Marina Diamandis enticed me with her glitter and Raggedy Ann hair, but she nailed my heartstrings to a fucking cigar box and picked a chord on them them when I realized her earrings were little bananas. And the crowd went a little bananas when she jumped into the hit single “I Am Not a Robot,” her arms outstretched in an unironic Bono pose.

I heard glimpses of Cut Copy and then the Black Keys on my way back to the press tent, but being unable to enjoy any band from the Coachella stage without feeling like I was just at a movie with good surround sound, I headed to the Dome, where I saw the best performance of the night and possibly of the whole weekend: Beardyman, a UK hip hop import who would fit right in on Fake Four or Plug Research. More than that, he was possibly the best beat boxer I’d ever heard, and I’ve seen Doug E. Fresh live. Beardyman clearly had his mouth in the game, and could do great block-rocking beats a capella, but his technique of recording mouth loops on the fly and then manipulating them into Low End Theory-style glitch hop/dubstep beats was more than impressive—it was clever, and soulful, and made me think he was a force to be reckoned with, even if he was playing all the way out here on the furthest outreaches of Coachella (albeit in the most awesomely decorated stage of all Coachella stages, which was adorned with spray-painted tatters of cardboard sculpted into an Avatar-esque tree creature seemingly imbedded in a 1960’s style monkey bar set for giant toddlers).

Leave wanting more, I thought, and since Flying Lotus was scheduled to play at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs that night, I grabbed Associate Publisher Lainna Fader and headed for the exit. At least, I thought it was the correct exit, but after a wrong turn supplemented by bad instructions from completely clueless guards, we ended up walking for miles against incoming Coachella traffic, taking random lefts and rights around stables and golf-cart garages, each dusty trail leading to more guards who couldn’t direct us to Lot 4 but still wanted to search our bags and beep our wristbands.

At last we found the car, and liberated from the dust, the glow lights, and the Chemical Brothers, we headed to the oasis of the Ace Hotel. After a day in the dirt, I didn’t want to pound my fist in the ground, but it was nice to see a quality DJ spin in an intimate environment. Flying Lotus and friends reminded me that while a desert spectacle can be impressive, music is better when it’s part of a community. Hopefully the next day at Coachella would provide a little of both.

—Dan Collins

—Kristina Benson

(Photos forthcoming!)

You probably missed out on Radiohead’s Thom Yorke’s surprise DJ set at Low End Theory last week, so you’ll be happy to know that it was filmed!

“We have a very special guest tonight … act like he’s one of us. He is one of us,” said Daddy Kev, the Low End Theory co-founder. (via Pop & Hiss)

Rumors started that early that afternoon he might show up, but it wasn’t until Flying Lotus texted him photos of the crowd that he was convinced to come out. He spun an hour-and-twenty-minute a set of Kraftwerk, Burial, Modeselektor, Major Lazer, and Squarepusher, and danced adorably.

Filmed by: Theo Jemison, Grace Oh, Arthur Mor, Alter
Editing: Strangeloop