The Glitch Mob

Like yogurt, some ideas need to ferment before they're palatable to the masses. Take the laptop music micro-movement that kicked off in San Francisco in the '90s. Skinny guys with glasses, hunched stoically over iBooks and impervious to the dictates of the dancefloor, left the club set unsurprisingly tepid. But one of the sounds that grew out of that scene — glitch — is finally trickling down to party people at large, and was even much gossiped about at Burning Man this year.
The original idea for the genre was to overload one's music-making machine with too many tasks, which would force it to modify sounds in unexpected ways. Now there are ways to replicate those effects, but the result is the same — a scattershot, rough-edged, clipped version of electronic music's usually sleek lines. What was once the domain of nerds and their dateless friends has been juiced up and smuggled into the ever-present post-hippy-raver breakbeat scene. Leading the advance is the Glitch Mob, an amorphous crew of local DJ-producers (the MySpace page lists eight, but it frequently manifests in smaller configurations). Taking crunk and other urban pop music as its canvas to shred, the Glitch Mob manages to keep the dread-out yoga kids moving.

Some have pointed out that this sort of digital bastardizing of ghetto anthems has been done before, and with more complexity, by Oakland's sonic confrontationist Kid606, his colleague DJ /rupture, and others. This is true. But anyone attending a Glitch Mob throwdown will notice a key difference — people getting loose and genuinely having fun. Few seem to be scratching their heads in puzzlement, or cowering in the corner. Perhaps the music is a pinch watered down, but until now the Kool-Aid had been tart indeed. - SF Weekly

Last weekend in Santa Barbara was the 8th annual Lightning in a Bottle festival and I just could not resist the opportunity to bust out of town for a good old fashioned boogie fest in the woods. LIB focuses heavily on the electronica side of music and performance art. Think Burning Man meets Love Fest then make it intimate and put it in the woods instead of the desert and you have Lightning in a Bottle.

Festivals like this are always great because you get lured in by names you know and recognize and then ultimately you leave with new artists and music that you love and can’t wait to hear again. At LIB, the headliners definitely delivered but it was the lesser known (at least to me) artists that stole the show. Here is a brief run down of the people I heard while there that I think you need to check out.

The Glitch Mob (Ooah, edIT & Boreta) - I walked into this show at the Treehouse Stage and these guys were tearing the roof down. Some of the sickest, deepest, funkiest, hip-hop infused beats you will ever hear. Luckily these guys are Cali based and play SF and LA a ton. Look for them at the next Get Freaky throw down. - Metrowise.com