Cities of the Future

Here we are. The obligatory concert blog.

Simon first introduced me to Infected Mushroom on a mix CD that a lot of people got from Simon with Mr. Bungle and Infected on it. A few people remember this specific CD, like the CDs that Nick distributed of our videos.

Simon has been a fan of Infected Mushroom since he was 12. About as long as I've been into Daft Punk. So, needless to say, this trip had some childhood dreams going into it for him. He'd also never been to NYC.

I've been a huge fan of Infected Mushroom, more and more. During my time as a film major, I used their music (mostly the earlier non-vocal stuff) in my videos. BTW, this was my first concert. What an experience to set the standard.

We took the china town bus from Boston to New York City. This was a four hour ordeal. Nice bus for so cheap. China town was fun. We walked our way up Broadway and such streets until we reached times square. It is quite breathtaking to see times square at night. Simon didn't grasp why I wanted to see it so badly until we got there. I wasn't going to miss out on times square my second trip to NYC. I picked up a nice flat cap from one of the street vendors and we had a gyro. Good eats.

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It's kind of ironic, gyro. The show was the release party for their album, The Legend of the Black Shawarma. a shawarma is a middle eastern dish kind of similar to a gyro.

We got to the club, and the line was already forming. There were so many nice people in black or dressed candy. We met and talked with a nice couple from Connecticut. A lot of these lucky people had seen them before.

I sprung for the VIP tickets, because if you can only do something this awesome once, you better do it right the first time. The VIP area was a second floor surrounding the pit.

For the first two and a half hours there were DJs playing awesome trance and other club tunes. Very cool, but I was getting antsy for the main event.

I noticed something Jonathan Davis was playing some DJ sets. He broke out his Macbook Pro to load up songs from. The best damn thing Apple ever did was make their laptop logo light up.

And then they came.

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First was Rogério Jardim, the drummer. Then Tom Cunningham came out with his guitar. Erez Eizen then set up the keyboard stuff and everyone screamed. No sign of Duvdev (Amit Duvdevani).

They opened with Converting Vegetarians, an awesome song. Just when the vocals hit, Duvdev came out in a big shark costume. What a nut. The crowd was amazing. He went into I Wish from there.

It was at this point that I noticed how privileged I was to hear these classic psytrance songs redone in Infected's new psyrock style.

From there every other song was one from the new album. They did feel new, as the crowd hadn't yet memorized the lyrics. The one new song that caught my attention was Can't Stop. Cities of the Future was crazy, but bar none could compare to the energy when Becoming Insane led the vibrations in the club. It is definitely the most popular track. Special Place took me completely by surprise. I'd completely forgotten the whole "Bring it up, bring it up, don't take me doooooown" bit of that song.

The show was so fun. Duvdev up on stage fed completely off of the crowd's energy and we definitely gave him plenty to feed off of. He would hop around the stage, moving the microphone closer to Erez's keyboard, head butting the drums, and waving a drumstick like commanding the crowd as a conductor. At one point he even stummed Tom's guitar with his mic. The Shark costume made a comeback at one point.

What was amazing was that after the farewells, the crowd called for "one more song". They gave it to us, but then we asked for another. Y'know what? They gave us the second encore we wanted! They finished with Bust-A-Move.

The show was just more incredible than I ever expected it to be.

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It was 1:45 am when they left. We grabbed our VIP signed posters and left the club. We had to stay awake until the 6:30 am bus.

Our first destination was food. We knew we needed to eat fourth meal to stay awake. There was a diner we'd grabbed the address of beforehand. Not bad. Eggs and toast were about the only thing I could stomach at that point.

Simon and I couldn't leave NYC without a visit to the Apple Store. It was 24h's we were up at 3am. Why not?

It was cool, just like any other Apple store, but bigger. The real special thing was the staircase and glass elevator that it surrounded. That was neat. You've no doubt seen photos, to the street, the store is just a glass cube with a levitating illuminated apple symbol. You go down the stairs to get to the real store.

At that point we made our way to a 42nd and were nearing dead and frozen. After a little squabble about subway v.s. taxi, we took a cab back to the Fung Wah bus station.

6:30 took forever to roll around, but we were pretty much set. Anything else that happened from there was padded with black holes from falling asleep. I didn't get back to Keene until about 11pm (we slept at Simon's a bit).

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All in all, completely amazing trip. NYC and Infected Mushroom. Live. In person. Wow. I'm still in shock. So is my body. Man am I sore from all the nonstop walking, then dancing, then walking. :D