Growing up in Shelter Bay, Michigan, a tiny village of 35 people on the Upper Peninsula, gave Marlon Magas nightmares. “I was terrified of ghosts as a child,” he says. “I thought that they were all around me. There was a trail deep in the woods, a few miles from my house, where there were three graves with three small wooden markers: the Trudell sisters.” His elementary school, Deerton, was in the middle of some woods near a swamp, where Magas played during recess. The bus home passed an old cemetery.
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On his eponymous LP, Magas devotes the song “Deerton School” to his haunted childhood, but the series of mechanical chirps swaddled in loads of bass sounds more like bats escaping a belfry than scampering schoolchildren. Onstage he coerces effervescent beats out of a Roland MC-505 while commanding a bunch of sweaty weirdos to shake their booties. The electroevangelist has been known to whip off his denim jacket, hop around like an insane aerobics instructor, and shout things like, “Let’s go!” and “Feel it!” Watching him dance and clap off-beat, you can’t help but wonder if he’s pulling a highly entertaining, well-executed joke. But the record is a serious matter, weighted with hefty bass, tweaked-out, piercing melodies, and mind-numbing rhythmic patterns.
Magas and his wife, Bridgette Wilson, are applying this free and independent style to their new venture, a small shop in Wicker Park called Weekend, where they sell experimental electronic records. “It seems like people are getting bored with indie rock and are curious about other things, but don’t know where to start,” he says. “I think that there’s more innovation in electronic music than in guitar-based music right now. Or maybe the innovation in rock just isn’t as striking to the ear, because you’re dealing with the same basic sounds that have been kicking around for 30 or 40 years. Ground is continually being broken in electronic music, and that’s exciting to me–when I get a European record in a disco sleeve, I figure there’s a fifty-fifty chance my mind could be blown.” Since DJ culture and music can seem impenetrable to outsiders, they want Weekend to be friendly and approachable.
–Liz Armstrong
