MNDR played a great show with V.V. Brown and Class Actress at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC last night and The Village Voice was on hand to soak it all in. They really loved her projections, calling it a “a hell of a mind-bending spectacle going behind her, a mixture of Atari-style blocky stuff and digital Spirograph fantasias synced up to respond to both her voice and, ideally, ours.” Though of course that’s nothing without “her muscular, blaring gearhead-techno anthems, with startlingly gooey pop centers, are rousing enough; the mighty ‘Fade to Black’ especially.”
As a physical presence, too, Warner is fascinating, with her blocky white glasses and slightly regal, slightly nerdy air, gripping her mic stand with authority and vogue-ing with aplomb. She casually mentions that she was in the ER last night with a fever of 102; her set actually climaxes between songs, where she tests the whole voice-activated light show thing, wherein we all scream and the screen behind her slowly turns solid white. “Now we’re all connected, like string theory,” she announces, satisfied. “Even though string theory is kinda fake.”
Read the whole article on the Village Voice’s website.
The Village Voice selected MNDR as one of the top New York-based acts to see for their “SXSW Cheat Sheet 2010”. With shows lined up over the week, you’ll be able to experience what the Village Voice did firsthand:
Sneaking onto a snoozy recent Mercury Lounge lineup of charisma-less “chillwave” wallflowers, flagrantly nerdy electro-diva MNDR dropped like a bomb, with an enormous pair of glasses, an epilepsy-inducing light show, some fantastic dance-pop jams (“Fade to Black” especially), and a bombastic, unignorable personality: “OK, seriously, you can move to this music! This is techno!” The Fader is in love with her, and rightly so: An apparent tech-head, she can build you an amp out of spare parts and then blast all manner of engrossing egghead dance-floor ephemera through it. Here’s your Lady Gaga in training, if she doesn’t morph into something weirder, flashier, better.
Check out the rest of the list here and of course, catch MNDR at upcoming SXSW performances.
In case you didn’t make it to any of MNDR’s sold out shows last week with Neon Indian, there’s been a bit of press out there to remind you what you missed. Latest is a review of the show in the Village Voice:
One-woman Brooklyn-by-way-of-Oakland band MNDR is way, way more enjoyable — I am profoundly suspicious of anyone who self-identifies as “ghettotech,” but she’s brassy and volatile and cheeseball-anthemic in a not-unlike-Lady-Gaga sort of way. “OK, seriously, you can move to this music!” she thunders at a packed house too mesmerized by her light show to move. “This is techno!” Nonplussed, she soon moves on to the next track: “This is about being in love in China. And post-Bush globalization. This is not a joke. Everything I do is dead serious.”