Thought bubble: "I'm gonna Rock this shit!"

I'm gonna Rock this shit!

There may be some proof to how good the Boys Noize DJ set was last night at Fuji Rock’s Red Marquee in my not physically being able to write anything at all until now that the sun’s both come up and gone down again. All I have down in my notebook for the show is four words: THA STADIUM RAVE SHIT! There’s just something about Europeans; they know how to pull off that kind of massive sound. The Red Marquee probably holds around 3,000 to 5,000, but this kind of music could power a party that’s triple that big. Boys Noize – or Alexander Ridha, as it says on his drivers license – certainly knows how to pull it off. On the decks, he’s like a beanpole on springs in a florescent orange b-boy cap, and he commands the action like a kid who just realized, “If I twist this knob, I can make 5,000 people jump up and down like maniacs.” Ridha is only 28.

I don’t know why I keep seeing people label Boys Noize as “indie dance”, which would imply some portion of pumped up rock ‘n roll remixes, as far as I’m concerned. With no real vocal melodies aside from the occasional ironic and monotone newsreader-style sound-byte thingy, his dance tracks sounds a whole lot more like techno with a bunch of electro whistles and twirls thrown in (and these days, electro and glitch are infecting everything from house to hip hop). The backing visuals were his trademark style of neo-suprematist graphics and ultra-bold sans serifs fonts. Musically, a lot of the material came from the CD he released last year, POWER, but there was a lot more that came from who knows where. DJ Diplo once told me he gave major props to Boys Noize for putting together all kinds of weird music that you wouldn’t otherwise think would go together. This afternoon as I was starting to recover, another friend put it like this, “I didn’t know exactly what he was doing, but it always made me want to dance.”