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[Live & On Record]

Hrvatski and DJ C:
Techno warriors

Electronic-music fans who showed up at Lilli’s last Saturday night were promised a “battle to the death” between Hrvatski and DJ C (a/k/a Electro Organic Sound System), two local musicians nominated in the “Electronic Act/DJ” category of this year’s Phoenix/FNX Best Music Poll. “Once close friends, the two are now arch enemies as a result of their desire to win this very important local popularity contest.” Or at least that’s what the flyer said. As promised, the two cheeky DJs came through with a staged musical bout that included a giant dancing bird, ringside judges, sweaty booty shaking, and a loudmouth announcer, plus plenty of laptop trickery and turntable wicky-wicky.

Round one: Hrvatski came to the stage dressed as a large parakeet, complete with green luminescent wings and a beak. Choosing a pair of laptop iMacs as his weapon, he threw down the gauntlet with a set of frazzled binary burn that was alternately brutal and blissful. Orchestral horns get split by shotgun blasts of percussion; simple childlike melodies are cut short by ear-shearing explosions; playful ambient interludes are interrupted by the sound of a high-school woodshop gone mad — a cacophony of buzzing and gnashing saws. It’s all part of Hrvatski’s mad-scientist trickster persona. He enjoys nothing more than setting up a nice pattern and then throwing a wrench in the works, destroying the beauty with a barrage of fractured breakbeats and bowel-loosening bass. And for anyone who thinks that laptop techno is stuffy, cerebral head music, Hrvatski proved differently by jumping down from the stage and shaking a tailfeather.

Round two: hidden behind a red-and-black mask and wearing a long velvet cape, the “fattest, hottest DJ this side of the Mystic River” entered the stage looking like one of those Mexican wrestlers. Using two turntables and an electric bass, DJ C spun a 45-minute set that collapsed and destroyed notions of “mainstream” and “underground” with the flick of a wrist. Plus, he played bass and scratched records at the same time. How’s that for multi-tasking? Mashing up Southern bounce (Mystikal, Ludacris), indie rap (De La Soul, Jurassic 5), dancehall, and ragga jungle, DJ C drew a musical arc that stretched from Atlanta to Brixton to the Bronx to Kingston. Plus, the masked wax spinner did the impossible: he made the art-school crowd dance.

Round three: the bird and the wrestler returned to battle head-to-head, knob twiddler versus fader flicker. The winner, as of press time, was still undecided.

BY MICHAEL ENDELMAN

Issue Date: May 17 - 23, 2001