With today’s glut of weekend dance parties, it takes a lot from the deejay scene to perk up our ears, and unless your name is Jake Rudh—or you’re playing some grimy off-the-radar venue—odds are your laptop set is gonna end up just a pebble on the beach of cheap boogie-down.
That said, there’s one dude we’ll always shell out for: Minnesota’s greatest showman, the inimitable Mark Mallman. You know, Mallman. The dude with the Howard Stern hair-and-sunglasses look? A delightful mash-up of John Cage and P.T. Barnum, ambitiously avant-garde but not above absurd clowning and bald-faced gimmicks, Mallman (a.k.a. Mr. Serious) has been crushing keyboards beneath scooters, penning graphic novels about murderous robots, and playing 78-hour-long songs since as long as we’ve live in Minneapolis (and beyond).
More recently, on a road trip, Mallman broadcast a seven-day-long stream of continuous music making, even while sleeping, by converting his heart rate into ambient soundscapes. (The feat garnered him a nice write-up in Wired. Just this October, he released his most critically well-received album to date, Double Silhouette. And just to cap off a stellar year, he got himself named the Twin Cities’ best bachelor.
Suffice it to say, he’s got a lot going on. And on Saturday, December 29, he teams up with Blackout, a Kitty Kat Club dance night helmed by fellow music-scene vet DJ Bach. If you dress in all black, you get in for free. True, it sounds like a simple gimmick. But nothing is ever really simple when it comes to Mallman. We expect a bumpin’, probably weird night.
Blackout presents Mark Mallman and DJ Bach
Saturday, December 29
10 p.m.
$1 (or free, if you dress in all black)
Kitty Kat Club, 315 14th Ave. SE, Mpls.
kittycatklub.net
