Bumbershoot Dispatch: Nice Nice's Gasworks Symphony, Little Dragon's Deep House Surprise

I was curious to see how Nice Nice's sound would translate live - on album, the duo produces a dazzling variety of looped electronic music that sounds much larger than any two-piece has a right to. However, as fascinating as these things can be in the controlled environment of a recording studio, live looping can be an entirely different experience - usually one that ends in boredom for the audience.

Fortunately, Nice Nice were as inventive live as they are on album, using their electronic loops not as repetitive backing tracks, but as a dynamic conversation between the two band members. Guitarist Jason Buehler and drummer Mark Shirazi wove manic percussion and relentless, frantically shifting loops into a shifting cloud of sound. Watching the two build off of what the other was looping - adding a bit here, removing an element there - showed just how intimately the duo works to produce their eclectic sound.

And what a sound that was. Their loops today took on a harsher edge than their recorded output, veering between singed-neuron psychedelia & jittery dance loops. Their closer was a sparse instrumental, with recorded loops of metal pipes and bells swirling around each other to form a junkyard mantra. It sounded like the inside of the structures at Gasworks Park.

LITTLE DRAGON

For the first few songs, Little Dragon just wasn't feeling right. Yeah, the keyboards were vamping like crazy, the percussion was hitting hard, and vocalist Yukimi Nagano's sultry croon was working her usual magic on the crowd - her voice was smooth to an almost supernatural degree, and buried beneath layers of reverb, it sounded like a come-on from another planet. Still, for some reason, the Swedish group's weightless synth-pop felt a little anemic. The band hit their stride and then some, however, as the sun went down over Fisher Green Stage.

"We've got a new album out," Nagano told the crowd. "We're going to do one of our chants for you." And with that, the band launched into a minimal, hypnotic bass-line that evoked both Modest Mouse's "Tiny Cities" and some deep house classics. Drummer Erik Boden and bassist Fredrik Källgren Wallin kept that rhythm throbbing steadily while Nagano and keyboardist Håkan Wirenstrand played off of each other's vocal yelps and synth stings, turning Little Dragon's set into a full on rave. While I'm a big fan of Little Dragon's original sound, their more percussive, dance-based performance today was the perfect thing to watch as the sun set. Here's hoping the album follows in the same direction.