Cornelius at Disney Concert Hall

After bouncing around from restaurant to restaurant in Little Tokyo, because the restaurants weren't really what W thought they were, we ended up getting food (when W thought it was going to be a ramen place) at a disturbing noodle house. Disturbing because the walls were completely white and bare, not a single Japanese painting or kitschy decor in sight, and it was practically empty besides us, a table of Japanese kids, and a Japanese guy eating alone. Suffice to say, the amount of food wasn't worth the price and W thought the table of Japanese people were talking about us with the waiter. The service was bad and the worst part was that the waiter almost forgot to give us our chopsticks AND he didn't even give us napkins! WTF!? I know we were in a Japanese restaurant, but this isn't Japan. Napkins flow freely here! I was still bitter about it as we left the restaurant, running a little late to the show. Luckily, Plaid was opening for Cornelius, so we didn't miss much.

I don't know much about electronica, so I'll try my best to describe what Plaid sounded like. They're they kind of electronica that uses a lot of computer noises and sounds and beats. It's not so much about remixing several songs, if you know what I mean. They were kind of boring. They had images displayed in the background for each song that pretty much looked like a visualizer for Windows Media Player. I think one of the images actually was a WMP visualizer. It was the one with several colored lines bouncing all over the screen. Weak, I know. And all the songs sounded kind of the same and I didn't know where it ended or started. They all kind of melded together into one really long song. I can see why so many people were hanging around outside getting drunk. It was weird to see so many young indie people, having beers, and being rambunctious at Disney Concert Hall of all places. I almost expected people to be dressed up because the concert hall was so fancy. Luckily, most people were dressed kind of funky. My kind of people. :)

At intermission, we got something to drink and I must commend W on being able to chug an entire bottle of Heineken in less than 10 minutes. I could barely do half.

So, we ran back to our seats. btw, comment on the concert hall. It looked AMAZING. I loved the wood design they used on the ceiling. It was made to look like draped curtains. I couldn't stop looking at it. And the acoustics in the hall sounded fantastic. Also, I loved how the seats were arranged. They were arranged in a conelike manner instead of amphitheater style, so even though we were in the balcony on the 6th floor, we still weren't that far from the stage, we were just above it. The worst seats were behind the stage, especially since the screen was blocking them.

Cornelius started playing behind this big white curtain and there were lit designs moving along with the music. It was a cool intro. And Cornelius must've been an art major or something because most of his short films were so creative, like he must've been high or drunk to come up with some of the stuff that he showed. Some people have called him a mix between Beck and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. I kinda get the Brian Wilson reference because Cornelius plays some pretty happy sounding music, but Beck? He sounds nothing like Beck. The only resemblance I could find was in the short films he was showing with each song. One film he started off with had these 3 birds flying on a journey past tons of buildings and eventually 2 of the birds fell down and a lone bird was flying, but near the end he met up with a new group of birds and they kept flying. Another film had these dancing household objects. It started off with dancing spoons and then dancing sugar cubes and then dancing house slippers and they were all just dancing to the beat of the song. And for Drop, one of my fav songs, they had this water dripping from a faucet, but it was dripping from right to left and in slow motion going to the beat of the song, so it seemed like a visualizer but with real water. It was just a really creative idea. Anyways, very difficult to describe. I wish I could get a DVD of his music videos or something. I'd like to see them all. And he played quite a few loud noise punk type songs. That really surprised me because the stuff I've heard is usually more mellow and cheery. Anyways, now I know why people tell me he puts on a great show.