Lute Conduct

Blackmore's Night photosby Wild Don Lewis BLACKMORE’S NIGHT at the Wilshire Theater, February 5 Monks grab-assed duchesses in the aisles as Blackmore’s Night, the Renaissance-mewsick troupe of former Deep Purple ax cleaver Ritchie Blackmore, paraded into ye olde Wilshire Theater for revelrie surreale. The acid was less lysergic than uric on this occasion, though, as Blackmore had arisen with a case of the gout. (Isn’t that a Renaissanceaffliction?) “The good news is that he’s overmedicated,” quoth singperson Candice Night, the radiant co-star of the festivities, and Blackmore, despite Lady Night’s claims that he’d left his famously moody “preminstrel” behavior behind, proved the reverse by pitching a vintage bitch-fit when some mead-besotted boor kept demanding something like “Woke on the Squatter.” The Darvon failed to dull Blackmore’s chops. Sensitive economy has always been half his repertoire, and pressing 60, he demonstrated his current preference for perfection over abandoned expression, cutting diamondlike showpieces on semiacoustic guitars, lute and hurdygurdy (?yow!). His band, chock-a-block with multifunctional singers/instrumentalists and a rip-tearing gypsy fiddler (dubbed “Tudor Rose”), ain’t heard that Renaissance music is supposed to be quiet — if there’d been drummers who whomped and romped like this “Squire Malcolm of Lumley” in Shakespeare’s time, the industrial revolution would’ve arrived a lot sooner. They all crowded the hay-bale-studded and castle-backdropped stage in period costume — and you know Blackmore himself has never required thumbscrews to get him into jerkin and buskins.

Courtiers dressed for traditional values

Congenitally sunny and clear, the beauteous and gauze-bedraped Night kept things buoyant, seeming least at ease when forced to knit her alabaster brow, as on the Joan Baez Judas Priest moaner “Diamonds and Rust,” though she quieted the rabble successfully with the simmering balladry of “Ghost of a Rose” and wailed out some real-no-kiddin’ soul melismas on the dyna-soar Purple classic “Child in Time.” And lo, when she blew that little horn of hers, she did cause many a gallant to perspire. Blackmore’s Night summed up with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Which, in context, was food for thought. M.I.A. at the Knitting Factory, February 3 It’s appropriate that a chunk of this show’s door was earmarked for Sri Lankan tsunami relief. M.I.A. (a.k.a. visual-artist-cum-rapper Maya Arulpragasam) and most of her family fled that country’s civil war in her pre-teens, settling in England and leaving her Tamil Tiger freedom-fighter father behind. Even more fitting, she never explicitly mentioned either the benefit or the backstory. Though Third World politics pervades her lyrics — her opening number began, “Pull up the people, pull up the poor” — the on-the-cheap dancehall electronics and multilingual chorus-chants in which they’re framed mean to catch both ear and ass, whether you’re a DemocracyNowlistener or not. On her debut album, Arular(dad’s nom de guerre), this mix is exciting and prescient; the jagged single “Galang” may be the template for much global pop to come. But given M.I.A.’s art-school background, it’s surprising that she hasn’t arrived at a more individual live presentation than the usual combo of MC, hype-man (okay, tall Grenadian woman) and DJ. Pre-show, Philly-based Diplo blended the Cure’s “Love Cats” with Brazilian funk, but he was less inventive behind M.I.A., closing nearly every track with the same video-game “explosion” sound. Similarly, a brief DVD loop of animated maps, war planes and (of course) tigers lost impact by the 40th go-round. The live set had exactly two advantages over the disc. One was the inclusion of tracks using uncleared samples, notably the Sanford&Sonbased “Urqat” (now floating around online). The other was M.I.A. herself, whose guileless, knock-kneed dancing was a far cry from the hypersexualized choreography that accompanies much U.S. hip-hop; she was more than watchable, at least until her physical energy gave way during the last songs. She may sing “Like the PLO, we don’t surrender,” but tonight, she didn’t seem completely ready to take her own form of resistance aboveground. —Franklin Bruno THOMAS FEHLMANN & GUDRUN GUT at Bar Copa, February 6 Not all beats and DJ sets were created to get parties crunk, or to render its dilated peoples so ecstatic they’re being pulled over at 5 a.m. But just because a technotronic thump-thump-thump isn’t left running the cerebral cortex afterward doesn’t mean that the experience is “lounge,” or “chill-out,” or any of those cracker signifiers that actually spell B-O-R-I-N-G, or that it ignores inherently molasses-paced, future-funky deviants such as dub or that funny little “rock-away” (non-)dance that Fat Joe was peddling last summer. People of L.A.: Downbeat can be a ruler, not just a cocktail-sipping soundtrack. That, more than anything, was the lesson in the intimate joint rocking administered in Santa Monica by experienced Teutons Thomas Fehlmann and Gudrun Gut. Back in Berlin, Fehlmann (a two-decade-long participant in the digital-beat landscape who’s collaborated with everyone from Eno onward) and Gut (headmistress of the excellent indie-meets-techno Monika label) run a legendary monthly called Ocean Club. And though thump-thump-thump is definitely part of Ocean Club’s modus operandi, a grand, eclectic exploration of beats and deejaying tools is its true guiding light. Hence, Gudrun’s hourlong set — filled with fragments of oom-pah-pah overtures, Coltrane-ish saxophone invocations and piano flurries, underpinned by Berlin dub bass and various clicks and cuts — could remain progressively electronic and keep the sway going without the use of traditional dance-section elements. Within such a smorgasbord of sonics, she could drop the organ-break indie-disco of ’80s no-hitters Cynical Teens, or the slow-mo techno of Michaela Melián, and still have it make sense. Fehlmann, on the other hand, was live-laptopping all the way, re-creating the Dabrye-assisted, Dre-discovers-techno crunch of his recent Lowflow album. Soon, though, his BPMs began a-creeping and a-creeping into the low 100s, and most of the gathered had found enough of the groove that minor yelps of delight ensued. Nothing too crazy, though. —Piotr Orlov