Another birthday was celebrated with another radtastic show this weekend at Alex’s Bar in Long Beach, CA. The Mathematicians brought their hard-hip-rock-hop to SoCal in full effect and totally rocked my n’abes. Unassuming at first, this nerdy trio blows the roof off with their incredible energy, strong beats and science-infused tunes. An added bonus this time was their elaborate visual effects, which was absent from my last exposure to them at BAM. The video effects master off stage was almost like a fourth band member, complete with filming equipment and projection system. He was mixing the live feed with pre-produced footage of somewhat random and somewhat themed material (e.g. binary code flying around while they banged out Binary Girl).
     The Mathematicians describe themselves as harking from “the tri-county region of upstate New York,” as if that clears everything up for the audience’s geographic curiosity. “Oh yeah, I know where that is.”
     Pete Pythagoras (bass), Dewi Decimal (keyboards) and Albert Gorithm (drums) shared vocal duty, spanning the use of a vocoder all the way into electric hip-hop with trigonometric lyrics. At some point each one of them made it off the stage and into the crowd with tightly-gripped microphone-phury, screamin’ and bumpin’ into people (myself included), gettin’ all up in your grill while not missing a beat. Unfortunately they only played about a 40 minute (max) set, possibly due to an apparent delay in the arrival of their equipment.
     Pick up a copy of “Level One” or the recently released “Level Two” at their myspace page.