ME AND MY DANCE SHTICK

I miss playing dance-y tunes. 4 to the floor beats, pulsating, heart-heavy bass, and funky effect-drenched rhythm guitars adorned with light-saber synthesizers meant to injure your bones by electrifying it with deadly beats. No, I am not talking about the "showband" band kind, dishing out endless EWF covers with a front man resembling a zombie-fied Charice. With all gusto, I will exclaim my allergy to that shtick. This is not your ordinary disco.

2008: Must be the influence of Narda's 2nd incarnation and my love for Yeah Yeah Yeahs that I secretly injected my love for postpunk/dancepunk into my other Bicol band The Doldrums. Fortunately, my band mates were open-minded to the genre and swallowed the pill whole without hesitations. But 2008 is so far away now. I miss playing with those gals (and a guy!). They know how to riot by heart.

Fast forward to present tense:  while I'm listening to The Drums' Portamento and Friendly Fires' Pala here in the office, I can't help but wiggle my butt and sway like a bushy tree (I know that sounds wrong, but all my moves look so damn wrong so that's exactly a very apt metaphor) to the high-mid static of my phone's speakers.

This resulted to me daydreaming of having a band that plays the same shtick. One close call is when Ryan Villena (of Narda/Techy Romantics fame) and Nico Africa (of Narda fame) invited me for a jamming session somewhere in UP village 3 years ago. I was not really close to this guys but it seems they like my singing style, and me – well, let me just say I was flustered from the fact that my idols were inviting me to cook up something with them.

It was a strange set-up. Ryan was in bass, and tinkering with his keys while Nico is adding textures like The Edge learning to do J. Mascis in cocaine, interchanging riffs from his delay-heavy guitar to a reverb-heavy synths (man, I say "heavy" too much). I was asked to just sing along with whatever melody or words come to mind. Not familiar with this rehearsal style, I open up the draft folders of my trusty Nokia 6600 and mumbled words amidst the beautiful mess. I sounded like a pot-bellied Michael Hutchence. And you know what, it worked. Ryan is aiming for that LCD Soundsystem punch and I was heavy on Cut Copy then so our sound was not far-fetched to that dream genre which can allow me to be a swaying bushy tree (see reference meaning on the 1^st paragraph of this blog). We packed up with live recordings recorded in Ryan’s laptop and went home.

Never got to hear those songs again. Techy Romantics got big (and they are one of those bands that need to be experienced live) and everyone got busy with day jobs. So that was the last sighting of the trio.

Going back to the premise at hand: I am very much in love with Your Imaginary Friends (our new songs are awesome!) and a side project Everyday, Airplanes, who’s going to blow everyone’s butt with our own version of indie folk music, is writing more songs (and praying for more gigs), but I hope to find a couple of people to jam with that can do a synth-dance project with me. This was triggered insistently again to my subconscious last last week, upon witnessing how breathtaking the Foster the People guys are in entertaining their crowd and delivering their goods.

Plus, I want to justify my epileptic moves with well-written music. I can sing or play guitar or something whatever. Mark Foster did it. Diego Mapa is killing it. And Ed Macfarlane, no matter how gay those hips are, is a dancing demi-god.

So….know someone?