House Lights: SPACEMAN: DADA: ROBOT
The Electronic Planet Ensemble goes to insanity and beyond
Victoria Renard
The Electronic Planet Ensemble
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Perhaps no greater primer for the pump of the imagination exists than the mysteries of outer space. While the center of the earth, deepest parts of our oceans, and even the complexities of life itself remain shrouded by our still burgeoning grasp of scientific fact, nothing, it seems, gets artists, businessmen, intellectuals, and yokels alike as fired up as the thought of life beyond our atmosphere.
SPACEMAN:DADA:ROBOT by The Electronic Planet Ensemble muses on themes of the great beyond, exhibiting a collaborative, musical approach to what life might be like for the astronomical explorer. The Ensemble has been haunting various Austin venues since the 1990s, performing pieces with names like “The Tetragons” and “Alien Experiments” with the input of other creative minds in town. Consisting of Sergio Samayoa, David Jewell and Chad Salvata, the Ensemble also enlisted the help of Many Birthdays drummer Rachel Fuhrer to bring its space fantasies to fruition for SPACEMAN’s three-week run at the Vortex.
The show consists of 12 musical pieces featuring Samayoa on bass, Salvata on keyboards, Fuhrer on drums, and Jewell acting as both frontman and mouthpiece. For roughly an hour, Samayoa, Salvata and Fuhrer create musical backdrops over which Jewell does spoken-word riffs about life in space—for robots, for Martians, and for us. “Some of it was written ahead of time, some of it is improv,” says Jewell about the genesis of the music. Adds Samayoa, “That’s why we put ‘Dada’ in the title—because it’s an exploration. We pick a theme, and then we get together and just start playing. It’s all very spontaneous, and a lot of what we do live isn’t the same every night, either. Some of it is structured, but much of it is very open. That keeps it fun for us.”
A screen behind the musicians displays images of suns, planets, and psychedelic swirling lights. With “Take Off,” Jewell and the group prep the audience for its journey into the further reaches of space travel, which “gets you out of the house” and “may get you out of your mind.” Jewell’s soothing, deadpan delivery is backed by music that vacillates between tone poems, the sleek new-wave of Gary Numan, and the bemused, detached art-rock of David Byrne. Especially interesting is Fuhrer’s use of electronic drums, which gives the songs a retro-futurist feel: It’s like imagining the post-millennium years from the perspective of 1983, a brave new world dominated by keytars and A Flock Of Seagulls. “We wanted to use electronic drums to get that mechanical feel,” Samoya says. “And it’s easier to mix in a space like this. Live drums would be too loud and unruly.”
While it’s impossible to follow absolutely everything Jewell is speaking about, a few stories and lines stick out: The tale of an inquisitive robot created by another robot in “Robot Daddy;” a sad meditation on the brokenhearted and poorly treated “Billy Robot;” and a lot of discussion and speculation about a mythical “Space Whale.” Other than the obvious themes of exploration and The Unknown, The Ensemble posits space as a bustling, alive place where even robots know how to party. “I think the future looks real good for robotkind,” Jewell says. “Arthur C. Clarke said way back in the ’60s that the next step in evolution would be robots. They won’t necessarily wipe out humans, but…”
Nothing about the advertisements for SPACEMAN:DADA:ROBOT—which promise “a multimedia environment of sight, sound, and words to celebrate the meaning of the universe and all of the creatures in it”—is untrue, though it’s oblique enough to be completely unhelpful. The audience is given stimulus for the eyes and ears, sure, but the specifics of this show make it feel much more like a concert than the ponderous performance art visitors to Vortex might expect. Not once do the musicians break away from their instruments, and even Jewell (when he isn’t bent over his music stand in reading glasses), does a little “space walk” here and there, but otherwise he’s solely concerned with reading into the mic. The storytelling, the space aesthetics, the ’80s-a-riffic instrumentation suggests 2001 meets Sprockets crossed with Laurie Anderson. If watching freeform, moderately odd ruminations on space life set to a new-wave soundtrack sounds like a night well spent, well, the Vortex has a show for you.
