Atlas Sound and Fthrsn
On Tuesday, April 10th, The Center for Campus Involvement presented Atlas Sound in The League Ballroom. The name is an alias for Bradford Cox, who you may recognize as a music maker in the local band Deerhunter. The ambient punkrock performance drew a decently sized crowd, especially for a Tuesday night. Synthesizers and electric mixing brought a whole new meaning to guy-and-his guitar. In Deerhunter, Cox plays guitar, but does not always take center stage—the reason he has branched out to command his own act. Apparently, the singer songwriter works in stream of consciousness. Not sure if that means improv on the spot, but apparently he doesn’t write his lyrics beforehand. Pretty bold! Each song he played was incredibly lengthy, loud, and and mesmerizing- almost hard to tell one track from another. At one point, I laid down on the carpet in the back and closed my eyes to listen. Despite the volume, it could have lulled me to sleep. A rage nap, if you will.
I wonder if the majority of the crowd was there for the headliner or the opener, Fthrsn. (I was definitely there for the latter). As an award for winning this semester’s East Quad Music Coop’s Battle of the Bands, Fthrsn got the opening gig for this performance. Performing Arts Technology student, Macklin Underdown’s homemade musical alias, Fthrsn, is on the rise. Under the genre of Ann Arbor Bedroom Glitch Pop, Fthrsn is a spacey, technologically altered mixture of voice and computerized sounds affect. I’m going to go ahead and boldly say that of all of the current college groups making waves, this one is my favorite. I listen to his Soundcloud regularly while doing my homework and felt embarrassingly like a groupie when I knew all the words to the songs he played. But not too embarrassed to happily sing along. Normally the one man band acts alone, but for this particular performance, he called on the help of fellow music school students Evan Layborne on the drums, Peter Felsman on the keyboard, and on guitar, Jeremy Malvin of Ann Arbor’s pride Chrome Sparks. The set was paired with visuals of psychedelic nature, flowers, birds, and, of all things, hoolah dancers- an instructional video for the audience? Who knows, but I danced along.
Maybe it was because the concert was school sponsored or maybe because it was held on school grounds, but something about the evening felt incredibly prom like. The dark and open space of the ballroom was crowded in the middle with floaters milling about on the outskirts of the room, hesitant to join in at first though certainly wanting to. Also, I was there with a date and for all I know, I might as well have been wearing a corsage and slow dancing. But the evening was certainly enjoyable and, if nothing else, it was exciting to see Fthrsn play live when it usually only plays loudly in my headphones in the library.
Check out Fthrsn on Soundcloud and on Bandcamp. And get a listen to Bradford Cox as Atlas Sound and Deerhunter. And lastly, Ann Arbor’s DJ Peter Wiley as SUBVADER played beats at the very beginning of the show while the crowd filed in. All local, all awesome. All great music for summertime (Happy last day of classes!)
Below, pictures of Fthrsn and Atlas Sound respectively
