The Gang Font featuring Interloper at 7th Street Entry on 8/4/06

By: Ilya Ratner

The Gang Font Featuring Interloper - Photo by Ilya Ratner (click for larger)

Confusion and awe.   Those two nouns may be enough to describe the seismic cacophony that engulfed 7th Street Entry.  Was it jazz?  Was it rock ‘n’ roll?  Was it an earthquake?  Perhaps all three and a dollop of dynamite?  Whatever it was, The Gang Font were firing away like a WW2 Tiger Tank, and the room shook with every sonic boom.

In the winter of 2003, Hüsker Dü’s Greg Norton met The Bad Plus/Happy Apple drummer Dave King.  Norton brought up the idea of playing together.  King was excited.  An idea was born.  Three years later The Gang Font Featuring Interloper, with Norton on bass, King on drums, Happy Apple’s Erik Fratzke on guitar, and Craig Taborn on keyboards was formed.

Friday night was this thunderous quartet’s debut.  One foot in the door and the throbbing noise pummeled you like an angry rhino.  Fratzke stood center.  In a white jump suite and with more energy than a 7th grade cheerleader, his guitar blasted away and sounded more like a rabid Doberman than a musical instrument.  King crashed and pounded like a fearsome berserker, waging war with his kit with a snarling grin painted on his face.  Taborn tinkered with sounds and diffused the melody.  And all the while Norton stood off to the side like a proud patriarch, occasionally exploding with energy, but mostly staying calm, collected, and satisfied.

“I don’t like it.  I don’t dislike it.  All I know is that I’m confused,” said fellow music-whore Joe Lang.  “I think it’s great,” I replied. 

The music was unlike anything else.  It was King Krimson, Captain Beefheart and Wagner with syncopation that would give Stravinsky a hard-on.  It was like playing Metroid on DMT.  Anyone with heart palpitations would have either collapsed or have become inexplicably cured.  This was not a show for invalids in adult diapers; this was Thor slamming you in the head with a hammer.  Their song names are a mystery to me, but I imagine they have titles like, “Cataclysm,” “Kaboom,” and “The Four Horsemen Love Coltrane.”  It was bizarre, sinister, and fucking gnarly.

I’d go see the Font again, but next time I’m bringing a pitchfork and a blowtorch.  Though I’ll probably still feel like a bed-wetter as soon as the music erupts.

Location Info: 7th Street Entry
Artist Info: The Gang Font

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