Severed Pig Head Mode

January 24, 2009, Bowery Ballroom




The night started off calmly enough: a toe-numbing cold, a fender bender on Delancy, and the all-too familiar bass thump of German electronic music. Unnst uunst uunst. After a conversation about Utopia downstairs, as if to keep things in balance, my danz partner and I decided to thrust ourselves into the Euro-clash throng that had come to bob their heads at the Roxbury Bowery Ballroom last Saturday. The d.j.s of the evening were Modeselektor, a duo from Berlin whose last album of electro-hop rave bangers, Happy Birthday!, is covered by a waxy painting of the two as Madonna and Child. That, combined with the imprimatur of odd-selektor Thom Yorke (whose collaboration with them by the way is lovely), should have been enough to warn us of just how Berlin this was going to get.

After warming up with more generic cuts in front of video projections that looked to be sponsored by BAPE, the duo turned off the bass on their "for girls" remix of "Dull Flame of Desire," and began to lip sync as if they were Bjork and Antony. Then, in a scary robot (and German) voice, the one with the pompidour demanded a bottle of champagne. He shook it in time to the raucus "Kill Bill vol. 4," and when the beat explosion came, pop, we were all covered in Veuve Clicquot (I was glad they did not copy Rammstein, who use what looks like milk and a hose).

And just as the crowd dropped their defenses and swayed and bobbed lazily again, the d.j.'s alter-egos climbed in front of the decks, dressed as a butcher and a chicken. (They were a performance art group called The Fantastic Nobodies.) The chicken generously tossed out feathers; the butcher, wearing a pig's mask, wielded a cleaver and a just-severed, still bloody pig's head. Sirens seemed to ring, lights flashed. Animal rights activists were notified. An inflatable gorilla looked down at us from the back of the stage. Suddenly we were all yelping and dancing like children stranded on an island.

Clearly pleased, the pig-butcher snuck to stage left for a moment, whispered something to a girl who was holding the bag of feathers, lifted his mask, and frenched her. But he was quickly back at the center, and the d.j.s were beaming behind him, and the pig's head was beaming in front of him, and the assembled was throwing their hands up in submission, and his cleaver waved like a glow stick.