Review: Planet of the Mermaids by Electronic Planet Ensemble
by Michael Meigs
Electronic Planet Ensemble is the group of Austin cool rockers who invented the "music of the spheres" genre.
Like the earth itself, they come orbiting through the Vortex once a year with another adventure in space and time. In January 2009 it was Spaceman Dada Robot; in January 2010 it was Surfin' UFO. In October 2009, breaking that pattern with a bit of space-time insouciance, they sailed by in a reprise of their In.Car.Nation, a rumbling hymn to classic cars with spaceship shapes.
For Planet of the Mermaids, Saga-man David Jewel and cyber-man bassist Sergio R. Samayoa look to be generating the concepts and pushing the envelopes, while keyboard/vocalist Chad Salvata and wild woman percussionist Rachel Fuhrer give the stories and the melodies waves to sail upon.
It's invigorating, subtly comic, ironic stuff. The crowd last Thursday in the Vortex at Planet of the Mermaids was doing a lively theatre-seat boogy of its own, calling out encouragement and adoring the hot pastel big screen images for the newest modulation.
The magic for me of EPE's previous creations was the melding of word images, melody and rhythm. David Jewell's laconic verse and wryly reflective spoken images open your mind up the way a mild dose of psylocbin might do, while your autonomous nervous system grasps that rock 'n' roll sound track. Jewell's photos and Samayoa's images paint the background.
Planet of the Mermaids uses the same musical technique and spices it with some words by Jewell, but it follows a different visual vector. In homage to the fervid sci-fi imagings of the 1940's and 1950's -- Flash Gordon and many others -- the EPE has done a mad silent movie to accompany the hour of musical adventure.
The script has a spaceship crew of four crash landing on an island on an unknown planet mostly covered with water. Just as in the more outrageous B-movies, the place is inhabited by fantastic, menacing and alluring creatures. Jewell plays Captain Rex Vydor and wasn't that Betsy McCann as his girl Friday? Actors mimed this nutsy stuff in front of a "green screen" and Samayoa filled in the backgrounds.
The story has a herky-jerky motion and centers essentially on the sexy, seductive rituals of the mermaids and their crab-woman queen. Our heroes and heroine are regularly obliged to drink mysterious fluids that alter their libidos and their perceptions. This being Austin and the 21st century, the EPE can deliver visions of luscious mermaids wearing pasties or less, creating the hot visions that those teens back in the 1950's really were hoping for.
It's fun and funny. Wearing a dapper gray suit and fedora, David Jewell does get to deliver his mythmaking verse, but not as often as I'd have liked -- those twenty-foot-high images dominate the adventure with their mugging and nonsense. Some of the time Jewell plays a finger-screen fuzz box in counterpart to the intent electronics surging out of Salvata's consoles behind him. Jewell does deliver a fine set of glimmering images talking about Ahab and the whale (a favorite theme of his), punctuates one of the hot pink and fuschia scenes with a adroit alliterative rant in "c," and triumphs at the end by voicing the cool, macho assurance of Captain Vydor -- "Rex-o!" Fuhrer and Samayoa keep the loud out-of-body experience surging throughout.
As the credits rolled at the end -- a long list of them -- I heard a man behind me ask his date, "Hey, how long are they playing? I've got some people who need to come see this!"
Hits as of 2015 03 01: 3269
Planet of the Mermaids
by Electronic Planet Ensemble
Electronic Planet Ensemble
