Localized: Agape

For February, we at SLUG express our deep love for synthesizers at Localized. This love can be witnessed the second Friday of February at the Urban Lounge, a private club.

AGAPE

Ryan Powers: Everything plus breakdancing

For strange and unmentionable reasons, Ryan Powers and I met at Club Jaded one Sunday evening for this interview.

Agape existed for sometime as a group or at least a couple, although now there is only Ryan left standing. The bass player, Mike Wright, committed acts unmentionable in a family magazine with a groupie and left the band for fatherhood, leaving Ryan alone to carry on performing music that makes people’s teeth hurt. The first time I saw an entire performance, there was so much feedback that my front teeth were throbbing with pain. I related this experience to Ryan, and evidently he ups the amount of feedback and painfully high noises in inverse relation to how much he likes the audience. The night that I saw him play, he liked the audience very much, he says, and so the screeching was kept to a minimum.

Unlike many other local bands I have seen who appear to be showing patience and endurance in the face of unmitigated adversity by standing perfectly still, Ryan moves around like a Ritalin-crazed prepubescent when he performs. He routinely runs in front of his intimidating array of equipment midsong to perform awe-inspiring breakdancing. He does this, he tells me, because he wants people to dance and because he wants to dance, too. In a way, he is challenging all of us in the room to a dance-battle but sadly, few take him up on the implied offer. The first time you witness this, you will be shocked and potentially a little bit frightened, but soon you’ll get used to it simply because it’s a pretty awesome thing to see and because it looks like it could be painful and there are few things more fun to watch than the realizable phenomenon of someone hurting themselves.

At some point, all of our beer disappeared and Ryan and I challenged the goths who were milling about the dance floor to goth dance-battles. Pantomiming ripping out your still-beating heart definitely out-gothed even the most undead. After such an eerie evening, something sinister had to happen and as I listened back to the tape I made the night of the interview, I hear nothing besides distorted goth music and incoherent babbling. Agape will be releasing their new limited edition album at an undisclosed time in March at an undisclosed location. How mysterious.