Fun Fun Fun Fest preview: Blue Stage

Most of the acts playing the Blue Stage of Fun Fun Fun Fest would probably be better suited to a closely packed club, where their hard-hitting electro beats, synth textures, genre-juggling skills, or lickety-split lyricism won’t get swallowed by the great wide open. But that doesn’t mean the various dance-rock, IDM, and hip-hop artists playing the festival are in danger of getting lost in the mix; it just means you should move closer. Here’s a rundown of everyone looking to make you sweat this Saturday and Sunday.

SATURDAY

Betaplayer, 12:20pm
Austin’s Betaplayer vacillates between a slightly funky take on trip-hop and full-blown hip-hop, depending on whether smoky singer Yadira Brown is center stage, or merely providing the soulful counterpoint to socially conscious MCs Ibrahim and Pax. Confounding things further, the aggressive live drums, guitar licks, and smooth keyboard tones create a classic-rock vibe that suggests it doesn’t take many leaps to get from The Doors to De La Soul.

L.A.X., 1:05pm
Austin’s L.A.X. makes a sound that’s tailor-made for crowded dance floors and crowded after-hours parties, but even on a morning after, there’s no better way to wake up. The group whips Auto-Tuned R&B, chopped-and-screwed hip-hop, ’80s new wave, and house-music abandon into such a club-ready frenzy that it can’t help but stir the inner hedonist, no matter the time of day. L.A.X. recently proved its festival mettle with a showcasing slot at Austin City Limits.

Sugar And Gold, 1:05pm
A lot of bands, especially ones featuring former punks getting their groove on, have been saddled with the dance-rock tag, but it’s best to just call San Francisco’s Sugar And Gold (which includes ex-members of garage-rock group Dura-Delinquent) a disco outfit. And no, not disco-punk like The Rapture—we’re talking do-some-blow-and-take-a-stranger-home disco, accompanied by easy-listening jams that would make Toto and Michael Jackson proud. Songs like “Workout” and “Do It Well” should whip up some sweaty abandon in no time.

Foot Patrol, 2:35pm
Billed quite correctly as “the only foot fetish funk band in existence,” Austin’s Foot Patrol takes blind, virtuosic pianist T.J. Wade’s epic love for female feet and sets it to bumping R&B bravado. Dropping hot-and-horny come-ons that leave nothing to the imagination, Wade is, to quote Samuel L. Jackson, Austin’s foot fucking master (although his jaw-dropping synthesizer solos and naughty puns do be tickling). Live, the group’s slithering, sexed-up funk borrows heavily from Prince’s Minneapolis sound, even bringing in members of Spank Dance Company to play Diamond and Pearl.

Vega, 3:35pm
One of the many current monikers of former Ghosthustler guru Alan Palomo—who pulls double-duty on this stage as Neon Indian—Vega is his most unabashedly retro alias, hewing to a blend of Giorgio Moroder, Italo-disco, European house, and ’80s synth-funk that’s not any less effective for how familiar it is. As with his myriad other projects, it’s Palomo’s pop sensibility (not to mention his smooth, boyish croon) that keeps it from being merely an exercise in pushing presets, as Palomo has a way with dreamy hooks that’s severely lacking among so many of his fellow button-mashers.

MC Chris, 4:35pm
At this point, irony is no longer involved when Dungeons & Dragons and leetspeak commingle with hip-hop, beefy beats, and boastful gangsta-nerdiness. It’s a well-beaten horse, nerdcore rap, but one that’s usually synonymous with the squeaky-voiced MC Chris—even though he usually tries to distance himself from the genre. That must be pretty hard to do, given how Chris Ward (best known as the voice of MC Pee Pants from Adult Swim’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force) raps about ninjas, Boba Fett, and robots as often as he does about masturbation, being shy, and spliffs. Chris Ward’s more recent albums have taken on a darker but still silly tone, following up MC Chris Is Dead with the upcoming MC Chris Goes To Hell.

The Ssion, 5:35pm
A party band suited for only the weirdest, diciest parties, The Ssion crept onto most people’s radars with a bizarre concept album (allegedly about an animal band hitting it big) and live shows full of chicken costumes and cardboard instruments. They’ve opened for Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars, but the art-minded pranksters in The Ssion seem more intrigued by the go-go wiggle of The B-52s than by loud, rakish punk. The group’s last album, Boy, was a sleaze-disco ode to the joys of being gay, which it recently translated into a film of the same name—a loosely connected montage of music videos about childhood friends reconnecting in a world of seedy underground clubs and fortune-telling drag queens.

Neon Indian, 6:35pm
Somewhere on a steep and unnerving precipice—the one that separates ambient experimentation from the MGMTs of the indieverse—sits Alan Palomo, also known as Neon Indian. He has a few different aliases (like Vega, playing earlier in the day), but as Neon Indian he pushes beats out of cheap speakers in all sorts of interesting and unexpected ways. Sometimes that means danceable disco; other times it’s more like squiggles, zaps, and gurgles. Mostly, however, it's both: a full-on electronic freakout that’s not so hard to hum along to.

The Cool Kids, 7:30pm
The origin story of The Cool Kids—Mikey Rocks and Chuck Inglish—is an increasingly familiar one: Boy meets boy over the Internet and the two quickly discover their mutual love for '80s-styled beats and rhyming. The Chicago-based Kids naturally garnered a MySpace fan base, and the record suits soon followed. Self-described as the “new black version of the Beastie Boys,” the Kids opt out of clichéd thug-life posturing and instead write songs about sneakers and stuff. “I’m eatin’ a bowl of them Fruity Pebbles,” Rocks raps on 2008's Bake Sale. “How gangsta is that? / Not gangsta at all / You judgin’ me dog? / Please, you shop at the mall.” It’s tongue-in-cheek, that's for sure, but that's also what makes it so cool.

The Pharcyde, 8:50pm
The cover of The Pharcyde’s 2004 album, Humboldt Beginnings, says it all: The outfit that once initiated passionate love affairs between hip-hop and budding backpackers has been reduced to a pair of lonely-looking dudes. The original four-man lineup rocketed onto the scene in 1992 with the instant classic Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde, an exhilarating explosion of raucous humor, stoner pride, warped narratives, and goofy high spirits. Reunited for a stint of 2008 Rock The Bells dates, the early magic has since faded, but The Pharcyde can still dip into its deep catalog of classics and come out with new tricks.

SUNDAY

Peligrosa All-Stars, 12:15pm
A DJ supergroup made up of some of Austin’s hardest-working turntablists—including Orion, Hobo D, and Manolo Black, plus guests—Peligrosa All-Stars specializes in a distinctly Latin take on fiesta-rocking, incorporating traditional sounds of cumbia, salsa, and even hints of tropicalia into its bass-heavy grooves.

The DJ Melee, 1:30pm
This spotlight performance features some of the savviest competitors from The DJ Melee, an ongoing webcast highlighting nine of Austin’s best DJs who spent last year battling each other in 10-minute sets across the city. Expect the kind of head-spinning twists that only come when someone’s rep is on the line.

Astronautalis, 2:25pm
“Indie-country-electro” rapper Astronautalis has shared the stage with everyone from A Tribe Called Quest to The Polyphonic Spree to Rancid, which indicates both how seamlessly he blends his roots-rock, IDM, and hip-hop influences and how schizophrenic the resulting songs are. His latest, Pomegranate, muddies up the quest to define even further, delving into American Gothic sounds like sawing fiddles and penny-opera pianos to create an appropriately rustic background for his breathless run through historical fiction tales about con men, stowaways, heretics, and the Battle Of Trenton.

Alaska In Winter, 3:05pm
Brandon Bethancourt got a huge boost in profile for his bedroom pop project Alaska In Winter thanks to a guest appearance by Beirut’s Zach Condon, a childhood friend whose unmistakable gypsy airs lent a distinctly Eastern European flair to Bethancourt’s icy, downtempo IDM on the knowingly named Dance Party In The Balkans. Last year’s follow-up, Holiday, is the sound of Bethancourt both asserting his individuality and immersing himself in a grand tradition of German motorik (reflecting his new home in Berlin), creating a streamlined vision of softly glowing neon and vocoder-smoothed seduction.

Car Stereo (Wars), 4pm
Once a mainstay of the Austin club scene, Car Stereo (Wars)—né Chris Rose—went from blog favorite to festival-rocking phenomenon with a well-received album (2007’s The Bandit) and a slot on last summer’s Lollapalooza lineup. He’s been laying low in New York for many months, but he returns here for another round of Girl Talk-with-a-broader-musical-vocabulary mash-ups that value Three Dog Night as much as Three 6 Mafia.

DJ Nu-Mark, 5pm
A playful DJ who makes a compelling argument for recognizing the turntable as a valid musical instrument, Nu-Mark long ago cemented his standing in hip-hop royalty as part of Jurassic 5, where he worked alongside Cut Chemist juggling half the production duties—and eventually all of them, when Chemist left before 2006’s Feedback. Before and after Jurassic 5’s split, Nu-Mark helped develop the idea of the DJ as more than just that dude standing back there scratching up soul samples, whether it meant incorporating children’s toys into the mix, using a rubber band to turn his turntable needle into an upright bass, or just effortlessly folding hip-hop, samba, worldbeat, and funk into an entirely new genre.

Health, 6:05pm
Even at its most driving and danceable, L.A. band Health's music is a rush of bright disorientation, winding strands of ambient noise, bent-up guitar figures, and often unintelligible vocals into bizarro pop. Health is determined to find its own path to sonic abrasion, punctuating washes of pretty noise with some ribcage-thumping dynamics. Plus, behind Health's scrawny, multicolored-hoodie types is drummer Benjamin Jared Miller, an absolute beast who lends some metal-worthy balls to primal freakout numbers like "Glitter Pills." Touring with Nine Inch Nails in late 2008 apparently rubbed off on the band, judging by the decidedly more digitized (but still epically brutal) new Get Color. 

Buraka Som Sistema, 7:05pm
Buraka Som Sistema could be described as a “progressive kudoro” Portuguese band with a sizable following in England’s dance-music scene, but more important is this: The quartet cranks out electronic music that joyfully unleashes international club beats married with up-tempo, danceable, and energetic rhythms. The group's most recent album, Black Diamond, given a release by the vaunted London label/club Fabric, yielded a collaboration with M.I.A. on a song called “Sound Of Kuduro,” and its music fits into the sort of polyglot funk being spun by taste-making DJs like Diplo and Ghislain Poirier. 

GZA, 8pm
While other Wu-Tang Clan vets have seen their share of ups and downs since the group’s mid-’90s peak, GZA has spent those years working at a steady clip, putting out reliably solid (but hardly classic) solo albums every few years. Last year’s Pro Tools continues the trend: The Genius’ writing is still formidable, but (maybe due to the mostly unremarkable production) there doesn’t seem to be much fire in his belly. Still, no matter what he does from here on out, you can’t deny GZA’s 1995 masterpiece Liquid Swords, considered one of the best records to come out of the Wu-Tang empire. 

Kid Sister, 9pm
Kid Sister fans are a patient breed. Of course, the fact that the Chicago rapper is Kanye West’s protégé helps temper that patience with the expectation that when she finally releases her full-length, Ultraviolet, in late November, it’ll damn well be worth the wait. In the meantime, fans have been mollified by sparkling singles like the Kanye collaboration “Pro Nails” and the club-ready “Get Fresh,” a song that alternates between stuttering rapping and unexpected harmonizing.