DJ Wick-It the Instigator
While The Spin confesses unconditional and non-discriminatory adoration for all musical styles, local EDM shows are a rarity for us. Maybe Nashville’s dearth of quality dance clubs explains that. Or maybe it's just our distaste for downtown night-life joints like the recently shuttered SEEN. That said, Saturday night’s EDM offering — Wick-It the Instigator at The Basement East — didn’t leave us much to grouse about. The still-fresh-and-clean-feeling club's spacious digs, superior sound and proximity to our East Side abode made the show a bit of a no-brainer.
We entered the belly of The Beast in time to catch the last bit of Milwaukee producer Artifakts, whose heavy dose of boom-bap beats and vintage soul samples had us nodding our heads on arrival. Fusing classic breaks from hip-hop’s golden era with gritty synths and filter sweeps, this stuff fell somewhere between the post-modern sonic collage of RJD2 and the dense, trippy layers of Pretty Lights.
Artifakts
While not quite packed but by no means sparsely attended, The Beast was comfortable, with a spirited crowd of hard-partying millennials. But the familiar faces of a few local hip-hop luminaries were spotted here and there — there was a rare appearance by cable access personality turned YouTube chef Big Fella.
Manic Focus
Our people-watch was cut short when Chicago’s Manic Focus fired up the next set. While we later learned the group typically performs as a four-piece, there were only two members on Saturday. With one fellow armed with a laptop and the other behind a drum kit, the two muscled through an hour of human-powered EDM that ebbed and flowed with the organic approach of a jam band, back and forth from high-powered dance music to old school hip-hip instrumentals. While the drums would inevitably steal the show at times, they often drifted back into the mix almost long enough to be forgotten before pounding their way into the spotlight once more. Incorporating live instruments into the set has become par for the course for a lot of DJs, but this is one of the most seamless examples we’ve seen so far.
For the main event, local OG Wick-It the Instigator, aka DJ Andrew Owsley, held court over a sea of LED-powered bracelets he’d handed out to the crowd earlier. Each one was synced to his controls, blinking and twinkling in unison, creating a party-boosting interactive stage show. But these folks didn’t really need any gimmicks to get into the spirit — this was a Wick-It show. From his beer-chugging Flabongo routine to his mid-set guitar solos and turbo-powered mix of tweaked-out guilty pleasures, it’s tough to tell where the Instigator’s gimmicks stop and his simple love of showmanship begins.
Thing is, during a Wick-It set, there are no guilty pleasures. From Johnny Cash to Van Halen, nothing is sacred or safe from his remixes, nor is anything too stale for a spot in his repertoire. Even The Contours’ “Do You Love Me?” was pimped out with a modern spin of bombastic beats, filter sweeps, builds and drops with one clear objective in mind — the party. There's a mighty hearty supply of haters who’d choke on their own outrage over Wick-It’s high-energy reboot of “Walk the Line” or his audacious treatment of any number of hallowed classics. This music is probably as much for them — he doesn’t call himself “The Instigator” for nothing. But in that respect, it’s also for everyone else — or at least anyone willing to check their pretense at the door and shed any notion of the rules, as those are the kinds of people down with Wick-It's idea of a party. If that’s a gimmick, then it’s one of the best Nashville has running at the moment.
