Pop Music Reviews : Meat Beat Manifesto Stages the Dream

In his essays on fiction, the late novelist John Gardner wrote that the first responsibility of a writer is to maintain the fabric of the dream, to interject nothing that might distract the reader from the plot, the characters, the mood. The same thing might well be said of electronic dance music, but where most house and techno artists take great care not to interject anything at all into their friezes of pulse, whomp and jittery syncopation, it is a rare band that can sustain both a trance and a listener’s interest.

At the Park Plaza on Saturday, on a three-band tour put together by the New York nightclub Communion, the English industrial-dance group Meat Beat Manifesto had the loose, post-midnight, almost hallucinatory quality of early hip-hop mix radio shows, electronic beats that flowed into live bass and drums, the compulsive dance-ability of dub, an ultra-dense, multimedia collage that at times seem closer to “Nation of Millions”-era Public Enemy.

The music had the heavy syncopation, the beats of hip-hop, but with a certain techno-based lack of swing. Against slide projections of clocks, eyes, dictionary definitions, the Meat Beat duo (plus a drummer) stood in throbbing cones of colored light, fiddling with dials, pretty much static, seamlessly choreographing the eyes-open dream.