Author: Riley Urbano
All photos courtesy of the author.
I’d like to talk to you for a moment about Jabon. The first really musical moments of the night came from Jabon, when I went to Neumos last week to catch Avey Tare touring for Cows on Hourglass Pond. I’ve spent almost a week now thinking of ways to describe this guy and the set he performed, but every time I think I’ve got something, the words curdle on my fingers and fail to convey the sheer totality of that experience… Hmm.
Suffice to say: Jabon was like if Oneohtrix Point Never’s Garden of Delete stuff was really just a Tim and Eric bit. He was like Neil Cicierega doing Autechre remixes. Jabon was like this:
Mixed with some of the dancing in this:
The man came out on stage wearing full black and yellow face paint, a literal wizard’s robe, and shiny silver pants. He spent a not-insignificant portion of his set reading from his “Death Book” and listing off types of noodles; the crowd was literally going crazy for this.
Strange to say, but I really don’t know if I’ve ever seen a solo artist work a crowd with such assurance and glee as Jabon did that night — it was sure as hell the first time I’ve seen a crowd demand an encore from the show’s opening act. By the end of the set, I was pretty literally dumbfounded by the music and dancing I’d just experienced, because I’ve literally never seen anything like it.
As a recording project and performance art piece, Jabon seems to have existed since at least 1986. Anyways…
Avey Tare walked on knowing he was following a pretty big act and carried himself accordingly: pleasantly surprising was the inclusion of fellow Animal Collective member Deakin in the band. If there was any one thing that Avey’s performance did for me, it was the illustration of where Cows fits in the wider world of AnCo and related projects: despite having an almost classicist approach to psychedelic production as a studio album, the Cows material sounded almost like Feels leftovers, the way Avey had arranged them live. Fittingly, when someone in the crowd shouted a request for “The Purple Bottle,” Avey hesitated; kinda seemed like he was really thinking about it for a second.
As someone who’s been chasing and missing them on tour since the Centipede Hz days, it was honestly such a trip to see anything Animal Collective live, and in a lot of ways I definitely think Avey Tare delivered in all the ways I thought he would. He’s a bit shorter in person though.
RILEY URBANO | just a bunch of noise | KXSU Music Reporter