If Psychostick is at the lighthearted end of the musical spectrum, they’re about as far away as you can get from the deadly serious dudes in Heavyweight Dub Champion.
Presumably, the HDC bunch are nice, normal folks in real life. But their online presence — their whole image, in fact — oozes ominous, post-apocalyptic doom and gloom.
Their MySpace (at www.myspace.com/heavy weightdubchampion) is a labyrinth of language about manifestos and ancient temples and warriors and ancient texts and end times and ancient rituals and liberation. Lots of liberation.
Fortunately, my colleague Andrew Moore got to the bottom of HDC’s concept three years ago: “A lot of what our music performance is about is trying to bring people into that tribal state, trying to tap into that energy and that moment that gives birth to creativity,” co-founder Grant Chambers, aka Resurrector, told Moore. “The whole thing is centered on becoming a champion.”
HDC’s aesthetic is based on a 60-page treatise about a spiritual warrior called “The Last Champion” who “liberates creative power and creative energy,” according to Chambers, who wrote the piece while he was sick for a year.
Oh, the music? Right. The sonic shamanistic alchemists in HDC — formed in Colorado, now based in the Bay Area — create a giant sound that incorporates tribal trance, dub, hip-hop, electronica and world music.
“We try to create the most intense rhythmic, massaging, hypnotizing music, and lots of darkness in our music, because we’re trying to mirror our own lives, going from dark to light,” Chambers said back in 2006. “That’s the general mantra of our music — overcoming darkness and opening up to lightness and positivity.”
Heavyweight Dub Champion, with DJ Barisone ; 10 p.m. Saturday; $10; The Tulen Center, 20 N.W. Greenwood Ave., Bend; info@thegrove411.net or www.myspace.com/thegrovebend.
— Ben Salmon
