Show Review: Murder Pact, Flesh Produce, Lotus Path, Kissbreaker
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Glitching out on a Friday night
January 14, 2024
Earlier this week we caught word that Flesh Produce booked a weekend of NYC shows. We saw it as a Halley's Comet like affair seeing that the group was traveling all the way from their home in Seattle. Some of our editorial staff has Seattle roots and the music from the Pacific Northwest holds a special place in our hearts. We made sure to catch them with Murder Pact, Lotus Path, and Kissbreaker on January 12th at Trans Pecos in Queens.
The night opened up with Kissbreaker. It started with the solo vocalist pressing a button on a laptop and ended in a deafening barrage of chopped up Jungle breakbeats, thick haze, and screaming. It was a digital cardiac arrest of sound. The movie series The Matrix often featured a menacing flying machine, called a Sentinel, with a thousand eyes and octopus like tentacles. We kept getting flashes of this image in our mind during the set and felt like we were experiencing this machine's inner monologue.
Lotus Path was next, a five piece band that provided the theme music to a frenzied pit of moshing bodies. People crashed into each other like they were trying to split the atom. Songs switched from breakneck, to half time, to headbanging on a dime. Moshers jostled and some got tripped up. If anyone fell to the ground though, at least six hands instantly materialized to pick them back up onto their feet.
Flesh Produce flew nearly 2,500 miles for their set and proceeded to put on a clinic of complete rhythmic mania. Their drummer sounded like three drummers, unleashing hysterically fast blast beats while also triggering warping samples effortlessly. This duo of drums and vocals was locked in and metronomically perfect. They were also undeniably fun. No territory was off limits, the vocalist strutted around the stage, jumped into the pit, and at one point climbed the top of a seating booth to crouch like a skyscraper's Gargoyle and spit their lines.
Murder Pact was another duo, this time a drummer and what we can only describe as a soundscape sculptor. They delivered their set in near darkness except for thin beams of color flickering from the ceiling. The set felt wonderfully dystopian. Many twisted and contorting sounds of pure instrumental overstimulation eventually gave way to meditation in the thick fog. Beneath the many layers of complexity was a surprisingly simple backbeat that we anchored our groove to.
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