Reviews > Shows

EOTO, The Parish, Austin, TX, 11/28/09

On its first tour since the release of its latest record, Fire The Lasers!, Jason Hann and Michael Travis (percussionist and drummer respectively of the The String Cheese Incident) brought their own entirely improvised live electronica duo, EOTO, to Austin’s The Parish on Saturday.

An incredible ambiance was created for the show by Dreamtime Productions: a friendly bearded dude handed out flowers at the door, there was a massage chair, a sprawling gem and mineral table and live painting by local artists Pharo and Tourmaline Todd.

Hann and Travis took the stage and after a brief time tinkering with their wide array of gadgets, which looked like they had been transplanted to The Parish from NASA’s mission control.

The pair started the show with a wave of ambient, glitch-happy noise accompanied by Hann’s voice, so wildly processed and distorted that one might have been hard pressed to recognize the sounds as human. The vocals, which on Hann’s part were just random rhythmic arrangements of syllables, were then looped into the mix where they blended into the growingly intense soundscape.

Then, as if someone flipped a switch, the boys exploded into a hard-hitting break beat that threw the crowd into such a hard dancing fury, that the venue felt like it had just been hit by an earthquake. The floors shook while the duo improvised a full hour of drum and bass, glitch hop, break beat, house and trance music. All the music was played, recorded, looped, mixed and remixed right in front of the audience. With impeccably timed stops, hard peaking crescendos, and perfectly matched blips and bleeps, the duo truly showed mastery of its craft.

The second set offered up another hour-and-a-half of dance party jams.

After the show, Hann explained how playing intimate EOTO gigs, like at the 500 person-capacity Parish, compare to the massive audiences of String Cheese shows.

“Oh, it’s a trip,” Hann said, “When you’ve got six or ten thousand people on your side giving you energy, you have that to feed on. But when the stage is so far away from the audience, it feels a little more anonymous, a little harder to see faces. Then when you’re in a club the people are right on top of you and you can look and just get that energy from that one person.”