Hopkins students and Baltimore residents alike filed into Rams Head Live! for a concert by electronic artist Antonio Cuna, also known as Sweater Beats, on the Saturday night of this Spring Fair.
Based out of Brooklyn, N.Y., Sweater Beats is an established producer, having toured with such groups as Chet Faker and Chance the Rapper and even having produced a licensed remix released by Flume. His style blends dance music with electronica and R&B, making for a distinctive, energetic sound that is adaptable across concerts and clubs.
In Rams Head, the floor of the small Baltimore venue began to fill as the opening act, Baltimore-based producer Soohan, began to perform. While Soohan managed a few intriguing synth parts and a handful of energetic drops, he generally brought nothing new musically and passed between every EDM cliche.
With a sound that refused to rise or fall in intensity, Soohan kept the crowd in a stagnant limbo of blaring hi-hats, warped samples and monotonous booming kicks. Although there were a few bright spots in his performance, the same beats were recycled so often that his music became formulaic almost immediately.
All this was accompanied by Soohan’s stage presence, which was so unenthusiastic that even during the times the audience was engaged by his music, he did nothing to sustain their excitement.
Not long after Soohan packed up and left the stage, Sweater Beats set up and began the main act of the concert. The first thing that one noticed about Sweater Beats’s performance was a large video screen behind him, which continued to play throughout the duration of the concert.
The footage featured trippy animation and footage of items such as deer, donuts, skulls and strawberries, as well as flashing shapes and colors that morphed across the screen. From the beginning of the performance, the lighting picked up and colored spotlights panned over the crowd, drifting through smoke machines billowing across the stage.
Sweater Beats’s music incorporated styles ranging from electronic R&B to shoegaze electronica to trap and EDM. His sound utilized lush, layered synths and progressive rhythms as well as blaring, energetic drops. The concert was a constant stream of music drifting between beats, leads and intriguing samples.
Ranging from popular artists such as Alt-J, Big Sean, Rihanna and Zedd to more distinctive electronic artists like What So Not and RL Grime, the samples throughout Sweater Beats’s concert were engaging and accessible. By incorporating familiar songs and sounds into his music, Sweater Beats was able to display his style while retaining the attention of the crowd.
He kept the audience dancing and allowed opportunities for them to sing along. Sweater Beats’s stage presence was a bit more active than that of Soohan, as he bobbed up and down with the rhythm and encouraged the audience to dance and to get into the music.
At certain points throughout the concert, Sweater Beats abandoned the familiarity of EDM rhythms and samples to explore more eccentric elements of electronica, including whining synth lines, shoegaze textures and staggered drops. These elements provided a break from the stylistic monotony of constant dance beats, but perhaps alienated many of the less experimental music fans in the audience.
Freshman Cristina Murillo, who attended the concert as a part of her first Spring Fair, commented on her overall impression of the music.
“I wasn’t captivated by Sweater Beats, but I could dance to it,” she said.
Murillo’s words seemed to represent the vibe of the audience as a whole. More a DJ than a performer, Sweater Beats kept the crowd dancing but did little in terms of challenging the audience with progressive or moving music.
Looking across the audience in Rams Head, it felt more like a club than a concert, but the event was still an exciting experience.
Sweater Beats will continue to tour the U.S. with upcoming shows in Detroit and Bethel, N.Y.
The EDM DJ is also scheduled to perform at the Firefly Music Festival, which is held in Dover, Del.
