LIVE REVIEW: 100 gecs at The Sett

Within a sea of sweat-soaked, stinky indie kids, I caught portions of the 100 gecs concert at Union South on Friday, February 28. An army of neon-clad 20-somethings filed into The Sett Pub to catch the latest performance by the hyperpop electronic noise duo of Laura Les and Dylan Brady.

As a sweat-soaked, stinky, neon-clad, 20-something indie kid myself, I was thrilled to participate in moment after moment of ecstatic thrashing and computer-generated bliss.

The Madison music community was in rare form right from the jump. The evening got off to a hot start with opener Tony Velour — working the crowd brilliantly with an impressive display of auto-crooning hip-hop, backed by inspired production. The set peaked with a call to open the pit — much to the dismay of onlooking building managers. It was in this very pit in which I suffered what I have self-diagnosed to be a “sprained thumb”, a small price to pay to participate in what felt to me as one of the most responsive crowds I have witnessed in Madison in a while.

The endless flow of frenetic energy on the floor only increased into the gecs portion of the evening. Yet, amongst the chaos, was a space in which I am proud to say comradery prevailed and where show-goers looked out for one another. I witnessed (and participated in) several instances in which there was an immediate response by the people in the closest proximity of a fall — if someone went down, they were pulled right back up. Pairing this raucous frenzy with a sense of collective responsibility created a space in which you could enjoy 100 gecs’ frantic music in tandem with the invigorating nightmare of a proper mosh pit.

During the gecs’ time on stage, I felt pure joy in singing as loudly as my lungs could possibly sustain, all the while sucking in a hot typhoon of B-O air. Les and Brady provided plenty of fuel during their onslaught of techno-chaos, keeping the motors running in the bodies of the exhausted crowd. With hits like “money machine” and “hand crushed by a mallet,” there was no shortage of soaring glitchy medleys to keep things moving. Though the crowd remained locked-in and engaged throughout the night, the set seemed to end just as quickly as it started.

Coming in at around 30 minutes, some expected a longer performance from the gecs. In all the action, I worked my way around a majority of the crowd floor, from front to back and left to right. What I can tell you is this: if the set was any longer, I would have had a heart attack. My body was pushed to its max in those brief and glorious 30 minutes. When the set concluded, I was satisfied that I had spent the last hour or so of my life in a beautiful cesspool of panic and bodily fluids. It was both an example of sensory overload at its most exhilarating and a thoroughly taxing experience. I personally felt relief when they stepped off the stage, not because of a lack of enjoyment on my part, but rather a desire to breathe and drink water.

I was simply thankful to have shared such a wonderfully unhinged experience with friends and strangers alike. In a world in which we can often find ourselves in a repetitive schedule of responsibilities and stress, the feeling of being cathartic — to go all out with an attentive audience that, from what I saw, sufficed the job of looking after each other. For their part, Les and Brady were transcendent. By guiding us through a mystical experiment in focused mass frenzy, the 100 gecs duo of Brady and Les showed yet again why they are a musical force in the early 2000s nostalgia electronic music wave.