XYZR_KX, Jack Tung, etc. -- Minotaur Mini-Tour

Talk about a great rock show. How about two in one night!!

The San Francisco swing of the Minotaur Mini-Tour brought XYZR_KX, Jack Tung, and a bunch of other bands and mini-bands to the mini-venue Giant Robot and Retox. (Jon, if you has pix, this is a good place to upload them.) Clearly, all in attendance at the in-store performance at Giant Robot were very impressed. Babies were dancing, people were buying merch and it was a great rock show. Jon did not sing, but let his fingertips do the dancing on his chaos pad, Behringer mixer, and MacBook. After a video gamey anthem, sampling Baseball Stars 2, Jon succumbed to the pop demon and bobbed the crowd atop cresting waves of Daft riddims. The 7-beat loops were lucky charms, the seething underbelly beats a world beneath.

At Retox, a basement outfitted to look like an industrial airplane fuselage, Jon did sing, quietly, in his way, and welcomed all the comers to a night of technological expertise, sweet melodies, flying fingers, and loudness. Inquiring crowd members asked, did Jon sample all of those bits and pieces, or did he record them himself, as this author suggested?

Next, Jack Tung blowed up the mic without singing a word. Exposing his hip hips to the crowd while working away on his loop-de-hoops and non-hoopde-loops, twiddling knobs and pressing buttons, he also used his head, spitting out cracked, fractured chits of rhythm in 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,11 1/2, and 12, with some 14 to boot. The music laid out proofs heretofore unimaginable. "How much of that did he improvise?" asked my friend Ryan, incredulous at the intricacy of the designs. "None," I answered, confident that Jack's tongue anticipated each and every lick.