When the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago announced that as part of their hosting Bowie Is, the David Bowie retrospective, they’d be offering area music acts to perform Bowie music (in this case, an entire album) in their Edlis Neeson Theater, November 11’s presentation of Low by Chicago post-punk noise quartet Disappears was, on paper, a perfect synthesis. Bowie’s Low is equal parts atmospheric and straight ahead Krautrock-influenced rock music, highly original for its time and in the subsequent years, incredibly influential. Disappears have much of its modern inventiveness born into their sound, and where differences existed, interesting solutions poised seemingly at the ready. I’d never heard Disappears tackle keyboard parts this much, or covers at all really for that matter, and now they’d have to do both, but you could just feel that the high profile nature of the gig that they’d offer an explosive original presentation.
The show was, in a word, fantastic. When, at the end of the show in the theater lobby, the band announced that if a gig poster was purchased and an email address given they’d offer a sound board bootleg of the performance, this idea grew in earnest. I’d want something to house the performance I’d be eventually given, and thought that it’d be an enjoyable personal project to create something to put it on the shelf in. Continue reading