Finals week may be upon us, but that gave no pause to the studious youth who flocked downtown on Monday en masse for a rare glimpse at the Pretty Lights Music Tour. SuperVision, Gramatik, and Michal Menert put sub-bass frequencies to the test with respectively fresh deejay sets, creating a seismic reaction with Velvet Jones as the epicenter.
Titled after the stage name of Derek Vincent Smith, Pretty Lights has been offering an alternative to your corner dubstep deejay since Smith’s debut on the major festival circuit in 2009. The public could almost immediately tell that this was something different; a novel language of electronic music using the grammar of hip-hop with the sounds of soul, funk, jazz, and drum and bass. Throw in live instrumentation, a custom-built light show, and a beefy subwoofer, and you’ve got a party to unite an entertaining range of personalities, from the nerdy gearhead to the dance-floor warrior. When Smith started the label to bring together like-minded international artists, who offer all of their music online for suggested donations to circumvent sampling costs, Pretty Lights Music quickly became a genre unto itself.
The complex edits, digital synthesizers, and multilayered samples of Pretty Lights Music may be difficult to keep pace with in your headphones, but, fortunately, the body often moves quicker than the brain in these matters. Certainly, this was the case for SuperVision’s crowd, who arrived early for a homebrew mixture of head-nodders from his recent debut album, Telescopic, replete with ’90s hip-hop samples pitched nearly beyond recognition.