I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: June 26, 2019] Infinity Shred

I had not heard of Infinity Shred before this show although it seemed like many people were very excited they were opening.

If you look up Infinity Shred you will find a few genres associated with them: electronic, dance, post-rock.  I saw synthwave and chiptune as describers as well.

I don’t know the last two, but I think they all do a good job of describing this band (although synthwave is pretty amorphous, honestly).

Basically the band is a trio from New York.  Clara Warnaar plays drums.  I was standing in front of guitarist Nathan Ritholz and on the other side of the stage was keyboardist Damon Hardjowirogo.

In addition to their instruments, they also had three bright LED panels.  These panels were synchronized to flash red white or blue.  They each lit up a member of the band (with the drummer’s inside her bass drum.  I assumed they were programmed along with some of the sounds?

Damon introduced the band but his mic wasn’t working so he just shouted.  The band began, the lights started flashing and off they went.

At first, I felt like the guitar wasn’t doing very much.  It was all synth and drum (even though I could see the guitarist playing). That may have been because of where I was standing or it maybe have been that the guitar simply wasn’t loud enough.  It was clear that Nathan was playing things but I couldn’t get a sense of what he was playing.  There were no vocals, just walls of synths and guitars and occasional bubbling synth lines.

They played a song that seemed to build and then end, but at what must have been the end of the song, Damon kept twiddling buttons and pedals and then the second song started.  And it was like that for pretty much the entire forty minutes.  No definitive end to songs, just sounds that ebbed and flowed.

It had the elements of a post-rock show but the dominance of the synth made it seem more dancey than rocking to me.  I enjoyed it but felt like it was more something to dance to not to watch musicians playing.   And maybe it is.

About half way through the set a guy started aggressively dancing to them.  I was up against the fence by the stage and he kept sort of falling into the fence and then raising his fist and yelling.  When I turned around I was quite surprised to see that he was literally the only one dancing–doing all of those moves all by himself with a big open space around him.

The music was cool and dark and about one third of the way through the set I started to focus on Clara’s drumming.  It was superb.  Totally on beat but with all kinds of extra snaps and snares.  She did a lot of hi-hat, but there were a lot of slightly off extra beats that really kept the songs interesting.

About half way through the show I feel like Nathan cranked up his guitars because suddenly I became much more aware of what he was doing.  And with that kicked in the more post-rock feel of the songs.  Riffs that were kind of slow and building with interesting solo moments.  The one thing that prevented the band from being fully post-rock was the songs never really had cathartic endings.  Most of them got loud and then shifted into something else.  but it never felt like a let down, it just felt like continuation of what they were doing.  Rather than 5 individual songs they were playing a 40 minute piece.

Before one of the last songs, Damon started to talk but again his mic wasn’t working.  The tech people fixed the mic.  He thanked for coming and they finished up with one more song–the ending of the set was terrific.

No song titles were given.  I have no idea how many songs were played and as I listen to them on bandcamp, I have no idea which songs were even played.  I have found that I’ve been enjoying the show more and more the more that I think about it.  Like I was too in the moment at the time to really appreciate what was happening

They have three albums and an EP (and were previously called Starscream and released some records under that name too).

I’m still not exactly sure why they were paired with Astronoid, a much heavier band, but it worked well as a sandwich between them and Frost Giant.