DADA LIFE APTLY GO B-A-N-A-N-A-S! | Live Review | KONTROL @ The Beacham | September 16 2014

by Donnie George • September 23, 2014

Last Tuesday night, downtown Orlando experienced complete insanity: Dada Life. Dada Life brought the Dada Land experience to Orlando for the second time in 365 days and the Central Florida fans were ready for it. The Evolve Group, people behind the successful Kontrol event every Tuesday night at the Beacham, keep having to top themselves. Their artist selection for international bookings have been mass crowd pleasers, including A-Trak, Milo and Otis, Brillz and Sander Van Doorn, to more underground and emerging artists like Tchami, Mr. Carmack/Djemba Djemba and Wave Racer. Evolve bringing the crazy Swedish duo Dada Life to Orlando will be a feat they will have difficulty trying to outdo.

There was no doubt in my mind that the show was going to be a sellout success. Dada Life have been to Orlando a few times before; once in 2011 at Roxy’s former Tuesday night party Takeovr, and more recently, last year at the Electric Daisy Carnival Orlando main stage. My group of friends still showed up late even knowing very well that there was going to be a line down Orange Avenue.

I must mention the Orlando Police Department Officers outside of the Beacham were becoming really unpleasant and rough with the fans anxiously waiting to get inside. Agitated authorities are not foreign to the avant-garde Dadaist inspired Swedes. Their Dada Land Compound in Miami last year turned into a riot scene and as a result, the boys could not attend the 2013 Winter Music Conference nor the Ultra Music Festival in 2013 because the Swedish government took away their passports preventing them from leaving their country.

Once we finally got in, we were faced with the reality of how packed it was inside. Being a larger group, we slowly crawled our way through the back-center. People were beyond amped. There were a multitude of dudes wearing the traditional Dada Life banana costumes, chicks dressed in their edm festival-but-club attire, and a ton of people with the creepy Dada Life “One Smile”-masks. The crowd had definitely showed up Beautiful and was prepared to leave Ugly.

The show started with lights slowly dimming to a long, drawn out introduction… but the anticipation got everyone that much more excited. The intro included a video prompting the audience to the Rules of Dada (the title of their 2012 album) which got the crowd amped knowing that they were finally at Dada Land for the rest of the night.

The feel for the show was a crazy, chaotic, Dionysian-inspired, celebration of all things positive. Blowup champagne bottles and bananas, the staple of a Dada diet, floated through the crowd. A gigantic “DADA LIFE” inflatable bold font stage piece framed the DJ stand where bananas were attached to the stage. Trippy, frenetic, Adventure Time-like animated graphics were synced to the electronic music. There were occasional big, bold font lyrics instructing the crowd to all get on the same page.

My friend had mentioned that one of the members of Dada Life was not going to be there. I remember that Stefan Engblom, a member of the duo, had stomach surgery earlier in the year but I was surprised that he was still potentially out of commission. As the lights finally came up I realized that it was actually Olle Cornéer, the other Dada member, who was missing. Engblom, even solo, still did an amazing job getting the crowd rowdy throughout the entire performance. He even pulled off a champagne-toast hose-down of a fan onstage dancing in a banana costume.

The sets for Dada Life range into that controversial EDM (electronic dance music) territory – how pre-programmed is the set versus how much is live mixing? Is the gimmick and production work more important than the live-musicality of the show? Do the throngs of fans, dressed like crazy people, really care that this same experience is replicated through many other cities and festivals across the world? Probably not. But even with a potentially pre-programmed set there were still surprise remixes of Swedish compatriots Galantis’ hit “You,” as well as the Beastie Boys number one party anthem “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)”.

The two biggest highlights of the night included a mass pillow fight and epic sized floating banana.

At last second before the show, there was confirmation of pillow fight promised through social media posts. Now that Dada Life have attained the Guinness World Record for largest pillow fight (Chicago 2013), this is now becoming a new staple to their performances. During the middle of one of their song, hundreds of IKEA pillows (Swedes supporting Swedes?) were passed out to fans. As soon as the crowd was instructed to start the pillow fight (aptly at the drop in their “Happy Violence” track) the pillows were immediately shredded and thrown throughout the Beacham, similar to a Bacchanalian-orgy/goat sacrifice. Pieces of pillow ended up in my drink; in my mouth, but I didn’t care at all at that point as I observed this moment of extreme, collective Happy Violence.

Here’s a bit of the pillow fight I caught on my instagram:

http://instagram.com/p/tDRQIULxYy/

The other big moment included a remix of Gwen Stefani’s classic “Hollaback Girl”. As the song built on its familiar spelling of the big yellow fruit, Engblom whipped out the biggest inflatable banana that Orlando has seen since Kongfrontation was still at Universal Studios. He stood there, banana raised high above his head, and right when the song dropped, he tossed the gigantic fruit phallus off the stage with CO2 machines blasting the banana into the audience.

Here’s the epic moment I caught on my instagram:

http://instagram.com/p/tDZVetrxWD/

Ultimately, a huge crowd surfing banana that everyone wanted a piece of capped off the Dada Life show. Sounds about right.

Pictures provided by Christopher Keith Garcia:
On Instagram @crstofur or on Tumblr.