Adventure: Live @ ULU, London

Benny Boeldt, the human disco-MIDI machine known as Adventure, appears happier and more clothed than when we saw him morosely mashing keys in short-shorts in an empty Brooklyn toilet venue last fall. We like seeing Benny wear a goofy smile and awesomely bad trousers; they become his similarly inane music. He is, objectively, a silly-looking man who plays silly-sounding music. He is, subjectively, one of our favourite people right now.

He doesn't do a whole lot on stage. Perhaps he'll shove a key down here and there over a densely layered backing track he created in his house two years ago. Sometimes he only has one finger on the keyboard. At points where there is no melody to play, he doesn't need to do anything at all. It is with these moments of him supposedly doing absolutely nothing that we are most taken. Benny reminds us of Johnny Depp - not because they have any physical resemblance, but because the man exists like a mild lunatic as if it were the most natural thing in the world. We can't figure out what he's doing with his raptor-like hand motions. Or what he's laughingly mumbling as he steps away from the mike and keyboard while doing said motions. Or to whom he's laughingly mumbling said unknown sentiments.

Of the things he does laughingly mumble into the microphone: "I messed that up a little bit but that's all right." "That was fucked up."  "Whoa, forgot about that." He makes a few false starts and many self-critiquing comments, and it's almost as fascinating as his electro-epic, flash-animated fantasyland soundtrack music. It's curious to see such massive fallibility from the creator of completely digital geek-dance tracks, and definitely adds a layer of human interest to tunes bouncy enough to make a robot smile. We don't really know what it is that you're doing, Benny. We're pretty sure you don't even really know what it is that you're doing. What we do know you're doing is making us happy, and we're quite satisfied to leave it at that. 

Some would say that Adventure is lucky to go on tour with Dan Deacon, but we think it is Dan Deacon who is lucky to have him around.

Live photos by: Ashley Gordon