By Chris Nixon
December 23, 2004
San Diego Union-Tribune
Despite the onslaught of studio trickery and overdubbed live shows (see Ashlee Simpson's recent "performance" on "Saturday Night Live"), connecting with a live crowd and enhancing the dance remains central to a musician's artistic and commercial success.
Such late-'60s hippie bands as the Grateful Dead knew it. The early 1990s East Coast jam band renaissance, which fostered the careers of Phish, Blues Traveler and the Spin Doctors, embraced it.
Now, a new generation of bands applies the improvisational style of the Dead and Phish to DJ and electronic dance music cultures. Through constant touring and Internet trading of live recordings, these young lions build a grassroots audience and spread the word through nontraditional means.
Leading the way is West Coast quartet Particle, whose musical DNA consists of electronic dance music – formed around trance-inducing beats and synthesizer-driven melodies – along with a improvisational counterculture jam-band mentality. The group strives for a more human interaction between audience and performer, fueled equally by binary code and organic instrumentation. But drummer Darren Pujalet emphasizes the band's natural elements.
DATEBOOK
Particle
8 p.m. Wednesday; 4th & B, 345 B St, downtown; $13; (619) 231-4343
"If you come to a Particle show, you'll see that I play a lot of dance-oriented and electronic-styled grooves and riffs," Pujalet said during a cell phone conversation recently from his home base in Manhattan Beach. "But you'll also notice it's much more improvisational-based than most DJ dance music. We try to craft music that is more heartbeat oriented. If you start running, your heart is not beating fast right away. But after a minute or so, you're chugging pretty good."
James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, often describes his form of funk as "on the one." With their penchant for utilizing technology, Particle might describe its version of improv electronic funk as "on the ones and zeros."
The kids following and digging on Particle's music are not the "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" freaks of the 1960s or the trust-fund hippies of the 1990s. They are a tech-savvy eclectic crowd, comprehending the '60s infatuation with free form jams, '70s disco clichés and '80s kitsch.
Particle gigs are no doubt dance-friendly affairs, summoning the essence of J.B.'s funk with a new-school spin. The growing legions of the band's fans – dubbed "Particle People" – freely trade live shows online to spread the word.
Bassist Eric Gould, keyboardist Steve Molitz, guitarist Charlie Hitchcock and Pujalet formed Particle in the autumn of 2000. Four years and more than 500 shows later, the band released its debut studio album, "Launchpad."
Produced by Tom Rothrock (Beck, Moby, Coldplay, Foo Fighters), the disc contains 10 tracks of condensed Particle complete with ripping solos by Hitchcock and Molitz's space-age synth work.
For the guys in Particle, the process of boiling their live jams down to the essence wasn't difficult.
"In the live context, you can take your time and write a whole chapter, just take your time and craft your words and speak randomly at times," says Pujalet, who attended San Diego State University in the mid-'90s. "But in the studio, you have to confine that chapter into a paragraph. And you have to really get your point across quickly."
And Particle's talking points seemed to connect with critics across the country, garnering the band rave reviews from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and New Yorker magazine among others. The band just returned from its first European tour and plans to tour internationally well into 2005.
But for Pujalet, the main objective remains connecting with the audience on a deeper level.
"When I play in front of somebody," said Pujalet, who will play with Particle Wednesday at 4th & B downtown for a special Particle People Appreciation Show, "if I can take them away from their daily lives and responsibilities for even five minutes, I've done my job."
Chris Nixon is San Diego writer.
