LUCIDMEDIA

Remember, It’s Experimental Dental School

Written by Andrew Skinner Wednesday, 17 June 2009 10:18

Crashing through the North By Northeast Music & Film Festival [NxNE], warping our sense of time and reality, will be Experimental Dental School, also known as EDS or XDS.

Careful, the name is not Experimental Dance School or Experimental Dental Studio, or Environment something or other, and no LSD either! This pair from Portland, Oregon with the name that’s hard to remember, pump out dance riffs with beautiful eclectic results touching on every genre imaginable.

Invited up to Toronto while at the Austin, Texas Fun Fun Fun Fest they will be featured several times throughout the NxNE: First at Sneaky Dee’s on June 18th at 11pm, then the following day at 3pm at the NXPO Day Stage [Hyatt Regency], and that same night Friday, June 19th at Rancho Relaxo at 2 am.

The experimental nature of the band produces arresting songs that tease and hit dancy head swaying beats, with trippy 60’s early Pink Floyd memories. This duo is shaking and making the rock-art scene with Jesse Hall on guitar and his wife Shoko Horikawa on drums. (Didn’t we all wonder about The White Stripes for the longest time?)

East meets West in their Portland, Oregon basement, where they record freely with the world at their finger tips and their drum and guitar pedals at their feet. The high lullaby of Shoko is a perfect companion to the see-saw of banging drums and hard bass guitar stammering. The yin and yang of drums and guitar guarantees as Hall says that their shows will always include some improve.

“Even getting two people to agree on something is difficult,” says Hall the effectiveness of this two person collage. “So the effect is to streamline it all down to an effective machine.”.”

The music, for this reason, does indeed have a garage-pop groovy psychedelia with great tempo shifts and out-studio incompleteness. When I asked Horikawa about her learning drums, she explains, perhaps understating it, that, “It was not easy! It took me at least six months till I started to know kind of what I was doing.”

But this almost disinterested approach is part of the band’s raw power and success. They will have wide art-rock appeal to many at Toronto. It is both brand new, which will suit the press at the festival, and toned muscle from practice; stripped down from its earlier form with a third player at drums when Horikawa is on organ.

Hall is reaching out like a true artist for new tools and maximum ergonomics. He has done so by fashioning a ‘guitar-o-bass’ with low tuned strings running to separate amps to go to the places he wants to, “Anything to add extra sound,” he says.

But squirming like he does at times on stage those limits are boundless and unreachable, but strived for, “I’m thinking about bass half the time,” Hall says. But by being only two they have confidence and control of their music.

Not to be missed, you can download their latest album Forest Field for free at www.experimentaldental.com/free/

“I always really wanted to give-away a record,” Hall says, when asked why the band is giving away their latest album for free. “The music will spread easier when there isn’t that commitment of ten dollars. It feels right that people just have the music. Not having any barriers.”

Now that’s the kind of spirit fans can relate to! As for what XDS expects to encounter at their own gigs in coming to Toronto, he says, “People who are into this kind of music are going to be interesting people to meet.” I couldn’t agree more.

And on coming to Canada for the first time: “We want to see Niagara Falls, actually.”

Kind of an ordinary tourist destination for a band called “Experimental Dental School” but to each his own.

Experimental Dental School

Sneaky Dee’s
Thursday June 18th at 11 pm

NXPO Day Stage [Hyatt Regency]
Friday June 19th at 3 pm

Rancho Relaxo
Friday, June 19th at 2 am