Eternal
Golden Void, Tremor, DJ Magneto, Monkey+1
Tiger Bar 317 NW
Broadway, 222-7297
9 pm Monday, April 19
Free
The Sensualists, Eternal Golden Void
vs. Monkey+1, Planet Cha
Snake & Weasel 1720 SE 12th Ave., 232-8338
8 pm Wednesday, April 21
$4
Hip-hop takes all kinds. Take Eternal Golden Void for example.
This Portland turntablist refuses to accept Puff Daddy and
his ilk as the major reference point for the genre. To Eternal
Golden Void, following conventions is uninspiring. "Standard
is boring," he says. "Everything standard should be thrown
into chaos and new forms created from it. Life is a constant
struggle to evolve ideas into something we don't understand."
With his baggy jeans, hoody, baseball cap and black-frame
glasses, 27-year-old Eternal Golden Void doesn't necessarily
look like the creator of some of the hypest sounds in the
Northwest. He's calm and collected and carries himself with
an unassuming manner. Yet his art is all about forcing change
and bringing about new ideas through masterfully constructed
noise.
On last year's Dark Skies EP (Anonymous Projects),
EGV let loose four slabs of smooth, ambient hip-hop that
expanded the range of sound normally associated with the
form. On his newest and first full-length release, Monster
City, he opens the sonic realm even wider, incorporating
harder, deeper beats and spacier noodling into a more aggressively
danceable package. Don't look at this as simple party music--it's
cerebral hip-hop, flowing straight from one dome to another.
Originally from Idaho, Eternal Golden Void (a.k.a. Mike
Grenz) came to Puddletown in search of the opportunities
a bigger city has to offer. Most of his friends in Boise
were into industrial music and punk, and he was in an industrial
band himself. But that wasn't where he wanted to be musically,
so to instigate creative change he decided to make a geographical
change.
Unfortunately, Portland isn't exactly a hip-hop haven,
either. "There's a lot going on in town, but it's a little
frustrating at times because it's still a fairly insular
scene," EGV says. "There hasn't been a culture of varying
Portland music that has been predominant long enough for
people to cross-reference the different ideas." The scope
remains limited to the types of hip-hop that are easily
digested by the general populace. "The people who have gotten
noticed for hip-hop in Portland have been into reality rap
and gangsta rap," he explains. "There haven't been any major
turntable crews that have gotten any major attention."
Beyond breaking the boundaries of rap's contextual stereotypes,
EGV also finds it necessary to break down cultural stereotypes.
As a white DJ, he finds his skills constantly in question.
"My friends and I have been called 'Beasties' just because
we are white," he says. "It's usually by people who don't
understand how far we have delved into this. It's laughable."
Source material for Eternal Golden Void is limitless. All
records are fair game because all sound can be manipulated
and infused with an exciting looseness. With each successive
beat, there is a sense that any sound could be lurking around
the next corner. "There isn't necessarily a philosophy or
goal to creating this music," EGV says. "It's more exploratory,
where the music tends to create itself as opposed to having
a specific idea or seeking a specific sound."
EGV was inspired to approach music as a malleable art form
when, as a teenager, he discovered the experimental writings
of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. "I was reading texts
that had been cut up and rearranged, and I found that applied
itself very well to music," he says. "I always thought music
should be chopped and reconstructed and deconstructed. I'd
been doing cut-and-paste stuff with images, so it just made
sense to do it with audio in an attempt to forge a new language."
This new approach fell right in line with the sorts of
hip-hop artists he was into, particularly Public Enemy.
"They impressed me because they created music that was socially
and politically conscious with a heavy beat, but that still
had very punk elements to it," EGV explains.
He also discovered that other aspects of the b-boy culture--primarily
graffiti and breakdancing--ran parallel to his aesthetic.
"Graffiti is very much deconstructionist," he says. "It's
taking a set of letters--usually the names graffiti artists
choose for themselves--and changing it in as many ways as
your mind can come up with. It doesn't matter what the name
is, but that you are taking a set of information and deconstructing
it to a point where it becomes a separate entity from what
was originally intended." EGV says breakdancing has many
of the same ideas behind it. "There aren't any rules," he
explains. "There are certain movements people can name--helicopters,
windmills, flairs, crabs--but there are so many variations,
it's almost about finding how much the human body can contort
itself, how much you can abstract one idea to another. Breakdancing
is constantly redefining itself."
EGV focuses these inspirations into his sequencer and turntable,
taking pieces of sound from such diverse sources as Ennio
Morricone, children's records and old-school hip-hop and
turning them into brand new, invigorating collages. It's
not something people always get. He's had clubgoers get
in his face because he wasn't playing typical dance fare.
When things work out, though, the audience pauses, listens
and discovers that they can get down with their brain just
as much as with their feet, which is all Eternal Golden
Void asks for. "Hopefully, people will just want to try
to evolve their own ideology," he says. "Whatever form of
thinking or art they're into, hopefully they'll [use it
to] push the boundaries of what they believe and understand."
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 14,
1999
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