Review: KAYTRANADA at Echostage on Dec. 3

How often do you live in your body?

This isn’t a measure of activity, pain, exhaustion, or any external metric—how often do you feel everything, from your temples to your toes, from your core to the envelope of your skin, all at once? I’d wager that one’s consciousness, by habit or by need, lies dormant in their heads more than they’d like to admit. 

At best, we’re surface creatures. We become what we see, what we touch, what we hear, everything that can grace our outer selves. Everything we can process in our head.

EDM and house music help some people escape life as a perception pilot. Briefly, for a night out clubbing or a dance-walk down city streets with headphones on, listeners let the environment take over. The music creates an atmosphere that’s so clear, so enveloping, they need not internalize it. It’s life experienced outside the body’s surface. It’s form unbound and senses surrendered. Even if temporarily.

KAYTRANADA, however, has a different product with a different answer. With each new project, KAYTRANADA’s sound evolves all while finding authentic ways to incorporate elements of R&B and funk. Under the guise of electronic music, KAYTRANADA infiltrates the mainstream, his unique sound generating a clear thesis: feel everything.

At DC’s Echostage this past week, his thesis came to life. From track one, the crowd moved. No one flailed or moshed, because the crowd had nothing to expel. Instead, they migrated out of their heads and into their bodies. People moved with every limb, every muscle, in and out of one another’s space, never forgetting their neighbors in the crowd. They danced freely, as if made to feel safe rather than forced to create a safe space. 

Flowing from track to track without a hitch, KAYTRANADA let grooves direct the crowd. He offered the music up as enough of a director, rather than marionetting the crowd with common “hands ups” and “let’s goes” that would’ve crushed the energy.

Even at grand moments, KAYTRANADA’s never lost the crowd to spectacle. When a laser light blanket sliced the foggy sky during SPACE INVADER, it contained the space rather than disrupting it. People weaved through the crowd, bounced from the ground without leaving it, danced with full control.

KAYTRANADA can’t offer a more permanent experience than his contemporaries. The day after the show, I went back to my head, darting from stimulus to stimulus. But some hours later, listening to the setlist once more, I heard from my inside out again. 

If you want to lose yourself, there’s countless great DJs out there to try. If you want to find yourself all over, catch KAYTRANADA the next time he’s in town.