Ainu It!

[May 25th, 2005] There's a hypnotic dance beat rattling the oversized speakers in the cavernous front room at Holocene, and the crowd is responding like any crowd would to an able DJ. But the music isn't coming from some DJ's turntable. This is a live performance; the sounds goading these dance-floor revelers are invented at the very instant they are heard. This is what they call a "Live PA" in rave-speak.

The two men responsible hover like yellowjackets around a small table overflowing with bite-sized instruments-drum machines, bass generators, sound-effect generators and compound tangles of color-coded cables. Their arms never rise from the electronics-strewn table as they jitter about, looking as though their hands are soldered to the knobs and buttons they manipulate. They are called Ainu (pronounced "I knew"), and they live to make electro, live and old school-style, with real machines and seat-of-the-pants improvisation.

Electro-that funky, feisty, robot-celebrating child of German synth pop-was quintessentially represented by Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock." Though that song is known for popularizing hip-hop, its underlying aesthetic soon faded into obscurity, only to see revival as a mixer in flash-in-the-pan genre concoctions, such as Miami Bass and electroclash.

Ainu makes no attempt to water down the classic electro formula (paperlike snare drums; big, low bass; and machines only, please), though it has taken some cunning to make the sound resonate in the band's native Portland, which "is really more of a House [music] town," Ainu's Ted "Roshi" Laderas explains; the unapologetically synthetic sound of electro starkly contrasts with the warm, familiar, disco-based House vibe. "People don't always get what we're doing, so we had to learn how to lead them into it."

That Ainu is able to lead Portlanders to its brand of electro is largely due to the kinetic live performances. The duo must be aware of this, since its debut album, Octoporn (which hits the shelves later this month), was designed expressly to capture the feel of the stage show-to the point of including unedited improv sessions on the record: "A lot of the tracks we played live, like we just came up with it at that moment and recorded it," Carlo "Señor Frio" Pearson confides. "We mastered it, and that was it.

It was...totally stream-of-consciousness electro."

As sketchy as that all sounds, the listener is hard-pressed to identify the improvised songs without checking the liner notes. The arrangements on Octoporn are all confident and coherent, and sophisticated enough to make antiquated old electro feel modern.

Though they suffer no lack of snob credibility, the members of Ainu admit they design their music to stimulate dance floors. "We don't just make weird, esoteric pieces." says Pearson. "We want to put it into the structure that makes people move." Their populist attitude is a 180-degree turn from the infamous solipsism that has kept "true" electro inaccessible and unnoticed by most of the cover-paying public. The way things are going for Ainu, those days may soon be over.