Recording: Nyles Miszczyk & Justin M Ladd

Artist: Nyles Miszczyk & Justin M Ladd

Song: [excerpt]

Recorded at Smiling Buddha (Casual Drones 14), January 14, 2016.

Nyles Miszczyk & Justin M Ladd - [excerpt]

Having outgrown the small-scale confines of its former home at Milk Glass, the Casual Drones music series has landed at Smiling Buddha. Shifting to the larger venue has come with a definite sense of scaling up, with the shows taking place between two stages upstairs and down and the visuals (always a big element of the series) getting amped up even further. The main floor saw most of the stage removed to make way for a large lighting rig that resembled a sort of post-apocalyptic tanning bed and gave Romar L. Johnson a huge range of luminosity to paint with. So, to the good, there's a definite sense of ambition here — and the full house that was on hand showed there's an audience for this kind of experimentation. To the bad, however, this night did manage to live up to the series' derisive nickname of "Casual Bromes", with seven sets (and, by my count, ten musicians) but no women on stage. (And, for my money, I'm not sure why a night with that many acts needed to wait 'til almost ten to get started.)

This pairing saw Miszczyk on laptop and modular synthesis and Ladd on keyb to take a trip down the autobahn that went from the efficient glide heard here (that couldn't even be derailed by a brief loss of sound on stage) to a discordant destination with the drum machine rhythms shifting into increasingly-heavy distortion that eventually pulled the whole thing apart. Sort of like racing down the Trans-Canada only to come up to a twisted and broken bridge.