Just in time for Halloween, the WZBC kids booked F- Buttons. Yes, on Saturday night, in one of the oldest staples of this Jesuit institution, English import F- Buttons buzzed their bizarre blend of dance, tribal yelping and fuzz in the O'Connell House. Oddly enough, the show, as a whole titled This is Halloween by WZBC, marked the debut of its North American tour promoting the new album Tarot Sport, which was released last Tuesday. In the choppy but engorged 30-minute set, the British duo proved at once uplifting, sweaty, hypnotic, and frustrating.
WZBC booked a full night of Halloween festivities, including opening acts Growing and Ming Ming Dance Co. Outside of the main ballroom, student art work - from projected film to photography to painting, most of which had an autumn theme - splattered throughout the house. The radio kids also made trick-or-treating easy with a table teeming with candy. Orange and red ribbon laced around the banisters. An ever-changing array of eye balls projected on the staircase walls swirled and thrashed to the beat of the intermission music. With all the Halloween hullabaloo, the event drew a spirited crowd of about 50, eager to escape the standard Halloween slopfest and fall in a frenzied trance to some gritty U.K. dance music.
F- Buttons opened with an extended rendition of "Surf Solar," an incessantly looping, terrifying, invigorating dance track off the new album. As the demonic bass thumped in, the crowd - all clad in their costumes ranging from Tupac to Ziggy Stardust to someone who had created giant buttons with "F-" etched into them - gathered tightly around the duo's set. Like Matthew Broderick's homemade headquarters in the '80s classic War Games, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power stand at opposite ends of a long folding table, an array of synths and beat machines and even a children's cassette recorder. The blips grew more sporadic, the loops elongated, and the crowd morphed into a rowdy tribe, jumping and tossing its arms as if around its fire, the performers.
The band sounds like what putting oneself through a washing machine would feel like: rough, cyclical, sudsy, oddly demeaning, but in the end, somehow cleansing. Under the influence of a quasi-legal substance in Massachusetts, F- Buttons could induce either euphoria or paranoia, or an unforgettable concoction of the two.
But the plug was literally pulled in the middle of one of its songs, a mere half hour into Buttons' set. At the start of the song, one of the crowd members ran up the stairs and began spraying the sweating patrons with a water bottle. Apparently, some droplets spritsed onto Benjamin of Buttons body, and at this, he unleashed his inner diva. He seized the music and shouted, "What the f-'s with this water?" Confused, the crowd didn't know how to respond, except with nervous laughter. But when it became apparent the Buttons had finished, unplugging all their gear, the crowd began shouting back and leaving. A few fans tried to persuade the band to return to play, but they remained adamant on packing.
On any other night, for almost any other band, this would have warranted an emphatic condemnation of the band. And yes, F- Buttons showed poor professionalism with its antics. But on Halloween, on a full moon, on the windiest and warmest day of the fall, in O'Connell house, in the midst of the bizarre costumes and this primordial electronica, ceasing the music seemed an ideal way to close it out and send the people off into the night, baffled, rattled, and startled.
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