Concert Review of Saturday at the Treasure Island Music Festival. Whew! What a long day! The overall event was an amalgamation of big music festival and travelling carnival. 2 stages, 1 ferris wheel, a lineup of food venders in white tents, a yard full of various other tents housing an arcade, free stuff, games, merchants of jewels, clothes, and more stuff. The grass was soft and plentiful, but you couldn't see a speck of it in front of the main stage when M.I.A. or DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist were playing! The VIP tent (thank you press pass!) offered the only shade until the sun sank behind the skyline of San Francisco. Everyone present seemed thrilled to be at a big festival on the Bay, to dance in the sun, weave flowers in their hair, and see one after another fabulous performance on a proper boomin outdoor soundsystem. I have to admit, as jaded as I can be, I was thrilled to finally see M.I.A. live and up close, not to mention DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist. It's exciting to know that the event is powered by generators that are running on B20 Biodiesel, and that the promoters are local indie heroes of Noise Pop fame. The entire property was wide open from entrance to stage and you were free to wander at your liesure in any direction without being herded from one area to the next. Sponsors of the event didn't plaster their logos all over the grounds either. They didn't have to; the three major sponsors were providing refreshment and transportation: the over-21 bracelet said Heineken, Vitamin Water provided free samples (yay!) and the fleet of bio-powered limo buses proudly displayed the name of the limo company providing them. Did I mention that the weather was gorgeous? The cool breezes coming directly off the water kept the temperature perfect while the sun poured over the island. After the sun went down, a sliver of moon emerged like a cheshire grin over the skyline, disappearing and reappearing over the city all night.All the artists were fantastic and energetic. It was clear that the musicians were having a blast, it reflected in every performance. The sound was excellent, well equipped and well managed. I tried writing a review about everything I saw in this one day, but it would take up pages and pages. So what I have for you are stories about 4 very special acts: Kid Beyond, M.I.A., DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, and Gotan Project. There were so many bands, the music never stopped, they just alternated stages so there would be ample time to set up and break down without stopping the flow of live music. I wonder if we looked a bit like Pong to the people flying overhead? Kid BeyondKid Beyond blew me away. I love beatboxing when it its done creatively. The Kid is not only a vocal drum machine with multiple patterns, he can do tape echo and feedback too! He's also very expressive with his body movement as he spits, which helps the sounds take shape. His movements mime the sound which starts to trick your brain into believing that he has some object that he is bouncing around that makes the noise. It creates a third dimension or something like that. The sounds take shape visibly. The only other person that I have seen pull this off as well as Kid Beyond was a Oakland MC that performed at the Otherworld on New Year's eve a few years ago. That fella used his hands to make it look like he had a basketball. He acted like he was bouncing that basketball off the ground near the wall. As he is beatboxing a hip hop beat, it really seemed as if there were really a ball and we were hearing it bounce off the ground and hit the wall, then return to his hand with another thump. See what I mean about using body language and beatboxing together to create an illusion? That's what Kid Beyond does, only his beats are crazy complex, rapid-fire, and interspersed with non-drum sounds.Case in point:Kid Beyond - live at Treasure Island Music Festival:M.I.A.M.I.A. came on stage wearing more clothes than she ended with. She wore a colorful bikini top, made up of two parrot heads over her big blue Tshirt: That was the first thing to go flying into the crowd, revealing giant gold glitter letters on her giant blue T shirt that spelled MIA:Maya had a gorgeous woman with her to do backing vocals. The woman looked stunning in gold leggings that matched M.I.A.'s, topped with metallic gold hip-hugging shorts, and a black tank top that showed off her lean, muscular arms. Everytime I saw her face, she had the fierce and focused look of a predator. She was a perfect complement to M.I.A., both visually and vocally. Maya was in good spirits and her voice was strong. The crowd was cheering her every move, shooting gun fingers in the air, dancing, singing along, - the works -. She had the audience in the palm of her mic grip when she hollared "San Francisco! Need To Make A Sound..." Sometimes she paced the stage, sometimes she skipped, sometimes she put one foot up on the monitor and leaned in, Buju Banton-style. About half way through her set, she called out for the freakiest girls to get on stage with her, said she was looking for real crazy girls. Naturally, a wave of women started pressing towards the stage and while M.I.A. was hand picking ladies from stage left, a gaggle of girls flooded stage right. But there they were, dancing with M.I.A. struttin their stuff. There was one lady that M.I.A. had chosen - sweet lady with a big fro, cargo shorts and a wallet chain - who was breakin and dancing up a storm, and a guy (the only guy onstage besides the dj) who could have passed for M.I.A.'s long lost brother, with his gold sequin baseball cap and freaky 80's jumpsuit with neon accents and bustin a move! It kinda reminded me of the flashy dances exotic male birds do, flashing his metallic crown and flicking his brightly coloured tail feathers while jumpin around...Soon the girls left the stage and M.I.A. switched up to a banging performance of "Boyz". It was nearing the end of her set and she was really bringing it. The bass was thumpin across the stage from tall subwoofers one each side and by the end of the song, the sub on stage left was rattling like a piece of paper caught in a fan. "Boyz" had blown the bass speaker. Unfortunately, it meant that the grand finale song, "Paper Planes" was spitting and rattling loudly from that speaker. But, maybe it just added to the gunshot effect and the sense of destruction and mayhem. M.I.A. didn't seem to care, and she was the one closest to it when she was dangling 10 feet above it. I caught video of it, and the bass doesn't really register in the audio, for better or worse:Part 1 of "Paper Planes":Part 2 of "Paper Planes":I knew DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist were going to be something special. I had been told that they would be performing on 8 turntables with 2 guitar pedals, using exclusively 7" 45rpm records for sound sources. Well, that's exactly what they did, but with the addition of a repeater/looping device as well. As you can see from the video of M.I.A., it was pretty windy on stage. The set up for Shadow and Cut Chemist was wisely planned and included panels of plexiglass to block the wind. With 8 spinning plates, one can hardly afford to have the wind disrupt the needle on the record! This feature made photographs a bit awkard, but there was plenty to look at on the big screen behind them. Luckily there were trainspotter cams somewhere that were projected on the screen now and again - alegedly to bear witness to the fact that they were indeed spinning only 7" 45's! The video screen also displayed animations and vinyl technology PSAs for the amusement of the ipod-rocking crowd. My favorite part was about vinyl pressings being finite, limiting the number of copies that can be possessed at any given time, thus collecting and sharing of such things is special.They mixed a crate full of groovin hits, wandering in and out of every genre; presenting each song in a new context, from "Eye of the Tiger" and Nightmares on Wax selections, to De La Soul, Q-Tip, and everything one can possibly crate dig. It takes a lot of songs to cover 8 wheels of steel! I was so busy dancing to their surreal set, that I almost didn't notice when they stepped out of the "dj booth" and stood at the front of the stage, wired up and ready for action. They each had a turntable and a mixer slung vertically like an electric guitar, and they rocked that shizzle with some speed metal and warped found sounds: With screeching guitars and blastbeat kick drums, they scratched as furiously as a guitarist riffs. Throughout the show there were crew peeps throwing merch into the crowd: CDs, posters, souvenirs. When they finished their set, both fellas had huge grins on their faces, and they stepped up to greet the audience while throwing more merch at them. Gotan Project took the stage when the sun was behind the city's skyline and the stage was brightly lit with coloured concert lighting. Their music was was a complete change from everything else on the main stage that day. The appearance of a shiny black piano on stage made it clear that this would not be an electronica act. The 8-piece band kicked off their set with a french cafe-style tune that featured a strong accordion melody with a distinct tango beat. If you know the movie "The Triplets of Belleville" (or almost any Hennessey commercial) you know this style of music. Most of the songs that Gotan Project played blended the compatible flavours of 1920-1940's era french cafe music, merry-go-round music (another style where the accordion is dominant), a touch of flamenco influence, and of course, the fierce tango beat that they are famous for. The results were like a vodka martini that stirs one's desire to dance. A few of the first songs featured a hip hop MC which seemed totally incongruous, but the guys around me dug it. He was talented enough, but the music seemed to beg for smooth and sultry vocals. As it turns out, they had that too - a lovely female singer, who's voice was gentle, yet rang out in the clear night. She sounded like she had just stepped out of an old fashioned dinner club:sultry, smooth, languid, luxurious. As the band progressed deeper into their setlist, the beats became more dominant and the melodies sounded more synthesized or electronically manipulated. One song started right off with a pounding 4/4/ techno beat while another incorporated a house music kick-and-snare combo and at one point I thought maybe they had ended and switched on a CD because it sounded so rave-y, but that didn't last long and they went back to the oompa of merry-go-round sounds. My favorite pieces of their set were somewhere in between - a sludgey, laid-back tempo: a very slow 4/4 techno beat; a pounding kick drum setting the tone, and not too acoustic/classical, but not dabbling too much in electronica either. These few songs (near the end of their set) completely transported me to a slow, lazy summer evening in Louisiana. Gotan Project rounded out the night with the more traditional sounds of flute, guitar, violin and piano contributing to the melody. The music had a twinkle as it faded off into the roars from the audience.I hope this event is a smashing success for the Noise Pop promoters and Another Planet because it sure would be nice to see more events like this happening in the Bay Area. Sure, it had plenty of flaws too, but they were the kind that happen anywhere you get a large number of strangers together in an area with an excess of sun and alcohol. All the more reason to have more events like these: we can at least diminish the stranger aspect. And it was a great opportunity to showcase local talent side-by-side with international acts, and there certainly isn't a shortage of local talent around here. I think what could make this particular event one level cooler, would be getting sponsorship from a green energy resource and upping the environmental awareness aspect, like Citysol in NYC. The festival organizers put in a valiant effort for being the first event of its kind. They balanced a lot of factors and chose good people to see it through. They also took extra steps in certain areas that counted for a lot. Nice work to everybody involved in any way, and thanks!All words, photos and video by Molli Fire.