I found out kind of last-minute that Dosh, along with some other highly recommended musicians, would be coming to Great Scott this past Wednesday. I hadn’t seen Dosh before, but I’ve been listening to him for a while, so it was a huge priority that I attend this show.

Howard Ivans, which is the stage name for Ivan Howard, opened the night backed by Matthew E. White and his band (who were headlining the night). You might know Howard (or Ivans) as part of indie-pop group The Rosebuds. Howard Ivans is his soul-perhaps-even-baby-making-music project.

The set was, at its best times, reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield and Jamiroquai. In one song, apparently written about Big Momma’s House, you could ever hear the avant-jazz of The Seatbelts. So really impressive instrumentally. At the low points it was still enjoyable, but extremely unmemorable. Though there was a total of nine people on stage, this project was very vocal intensive and so felt empty with no harmonies.

He was engaging though, and clearly very exciting to be playing his songs, which of course helps out a lot when the music isn’t quite as interesting as it could be.

Dosh. Oh man, Dosh.

My college roommate saw him open for Andrew Bird like six or seven years ago. He came back and his main takeaway was: “you have to listen to Dosh.” I’ve had his albums consistently on whatever mp3 device I’ve used.

Dosh does crazy ambient improvisation over heavy looped drums, noises, sound effects, and tape recordings. Seeing him live was one of my musical highlights of the year. I can’t really compare this side-by-side with a regular concert because what I got out of it wasn’t what I’d go to most shows for.

Too often you’ll attend a show with someone hitting a pad or button that plays you some prerecorded basslines or chords or drumbeats. This guy puts it together right in front of you.

Martin Dosh sits down between a drumset, enormous mixing board, Rhodes keyboard, and a Nord Lead 2 synthesizer. He kind of collects himself, looks around, engages the crowd through a vocoder, then beatboxes a bit into the microphone. He loops this, and just keeps adding onto it—tom hit, ambient Rhodes chords and riff, beating on the top of the Rhodes with drumsticks, off-tempo and out-of-key synth sweeps that somehow color the composition and don’t break the ambience, a full hip-hop drum beat, smothering the microphone with a nut shell shaker—all the while mixing precise levels on everything that’s happening. At more than one point he pulls out a pocket recorder and plays a recording of someone talking, or someone else’s song, or his own 11-year-old self singing in a school play, looping this into the overall sound. When he starts playing anything, you’re not sure if it’s just to break up the beat a little, or if this will be looped and become part of the beat, which makes it all the more captivating; if you hear something that doesn’t fit, there’s always an amazing payoff when after a couple iterations it becomes part of the song.

Sometimes it looked like he didn’t have a clear idea of what he was about to do, or maybe the settings weren’t quite memorized or fixed the way he had hoped, but each time he built an equally impressive song out of thin air. Watching that happen, and then getting rewarded with the result is what made this an experience and about a minute after it ended, the first thing I said to the aforementioned roommate was “I can’t wait for his next show.” And I can’t.

Here’s 80 minutes of him doing his thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNkKg3mz9ZI

After Dosh finished, Matthew E. White and his band took the stage for a second time that night. Their sound was diverse, with trumpets at times sounding like a Sufjan-esque poppy mini-orchestra. A lot of the sound veered more towards the funk-rock of TV On The Radio, the keyboardist manipulating a fine balance between classic-rock-sounding keyboards and really out there synthesizers.

This was super enjoyable, and then they brought things down for a cover of Neil Young’s “Are You Ready For The Country,” which was extremely pared back with half of the band off-stage. They kept the country-classic rock vibe going for another cover, this time of Randy Newman.

After these, I was hoping they’d bring it back to the alt-rockiness they had started with, but they finished out the set with a few more classic rockers. It was impressive for what it was, but it was ultimately a lame note on which to end an otherwise strong and interesting set. The last song they played was a ten minute sing-along of “Jesus Christ is our lord/Jesus Christ, He is your friend.” So yeah.