The two founding members of Lazer Crystal, Mikale De Graff and Nicholas Read, didn’t meet under the most auspicious of circumstances. When De Graff moved to Chicago in 2004 his roommate, he recalls, “had some boyfriends, and I would always kind of befriend them and then they’d disappear. So by the time Nick came around I was like, ‘I’m not even going to try and be this guy’s friend, because I’ll never see him again.’”
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Read and De Graff agree that the long wait, though frustrating, was probably for the best. Their early guitar-drums duo, also called mcmlxxx, was half baked, and things only improved slightly when Read’s old friend Nate Murphy—who now lives in Atlanta and travels with Wilco as Glenn Kotche’s drum tech—took over on drums. With De Graff on bass and Read almost exclusively on synths, their sound evolved into a driving, heroic sort of instrumental keyboard rock, soaringly melodic but somewhat soft-edged and unfocused.
After a series of temporary drummers, including Erik Schwartz from the former Camp Gay band Voltage, Read and De Graff experimented with a four-member, double-drummer setup featuring Josh Johannpeter, one of Bobby Conn’s regular collaborators and De Graff’s bandmate in Mahjongg; and Cooper Crain, who plays in Cave and has a solo project called Bitchin’ Bajas. Within about a year the band had settled on its current trio lineup: De Graff, Read, and Johannpeter.
The inevitable revival of 90s rave culture has produced plenty of acts that dabble in rave signifiers ironically. Much as with the revivals of 80s hip-hop and electro, you get a mix of real appreciation and distancing snark that’s almost impossible for an outside observer to parse. De Graff and Read might seem to be making fun of 90s dance with their dated-sounding synth patches, but their relationship with the music is intimate and genuine. “To me the difference is in how people use influences,” says De Graff. “There are people who directly play on things based on the entertainment value, the irony that surrounds the influence. Then you have pastiche, an automatic kind of thing where you find it’s more coincidental . . . where you pick up on something that you write and it’s like, ‘That reminds me of this.’”
Sat 5/1, 8 PM, Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan, 773-837-0145, $10.
