SFBG Music May 7, 1997 Mixing for the masses The Chemical Brothers/Orb show turned music into mantra. By Neva Chonin 'TURN the cassette over! Turn the cassette over!" a post-teenager shouted, flailing his arms in the pulsing strobe lights of Oakland's Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center as the Chemical Brothers embarked on an encore in which the rhythmic hook of Dig Your Own Hole's "The Private Psychedelic Reel" was dismantled and stretched into an endless digital ramble. While the crowd on the floor of the half-full auditorium continued to dance up a delirious storm, those who had wearily retreated to the balcony seats were growing restless. Some, like the would-be cassette-flipper, advertised their ire to little effect. The bass-heavy drone was simply too loud for one individual bleat to register. These are the kinds of dichotomies that popular, sample-based acts increasingly face now that American media has finally decided to introduce dance music to the masses. Club kids are suddenly sharing their milieu with a mainstream crowd weaned on rock and rap stars who supply ready-made contexts and tangible attitude. It's an interesting juncture, and nowhere was the clashing and meshing of these two pop cultures more apparent than at Sunday's concert by the Chemical Brothers, a band whose oeuvre -- and particularly their latest album, Dig Your Own Hole -- blends rock and hip-hop motifs with the stylistic repetitions and enforced anonymity of rave culture. For the most part the combination worked surprisingly well. The moment the irresistible drum loop of "Block Rockin' Beats" began ricocheting through the auditorium and the Chemical Brothers took the stage beneath a screen flashing the message "The brothers gonna work it out," fans of all stripes were up and dancing. If the band -- Tom Rowlands and Ed Simmons -- typified "faceless" electronica by burying themselves behind a wall of equipment, the audience took up the visual slack with a goofy display of diversity: One B-boy shimmied beside a girl wearing a garland of green phosphorescent lighting tubes; another shared his space with a dancer boasting a Day-Glo wire halo. In front of the stage a beefy frat rat in a baseball cap crowned by blinking red lights passed a joint to an elderly hippie with a grizzled beard and full jester costume. Onstage, Rowlands and Simmons had a ball doing whatever it was they were doing. They pumped the air with their fists and fiddled wildly at their mixing boards. They spun in giddy circles and, during an extended version of "It Doesn't Matter," swung their heads in unison like a pair of metal guitarists who had traded their axes for samplers. True, they didn't address the crowd once during their 90-minute set, but that's nothing new: P.J. Harvey seldom ventures more than a random "thank you," and no one has ever suggested her lack of conversational skills makes her a dull performer. The obvious pleasure the Chemical Brothers took in making their music was satisfactory. Still, the performance had its shortcomings. The Chemical Brothers seem to have absorbed rock's excesses along with its traditions, and at times their mixes sounded more like the self-indulgent antics of '70s arena acts than the freewheeling jams they were obviously meant to be. And while the duo's foundation of heavy bass beats sounded wonderful booming through the barrel-shaped auditorium, the result was often so overbearing that it left little space for listeners to respond or interpret. If the Chemical Brothers brought their rhythmic world to bear on the crowd, co-headliner the Orb supplied spacey psychic-delic soundscapes in which individual audience members were free to invent their own singular universes and still retain a sense of collectivity. For an hour and a half Orb founder and composer Alex Patterson and his fellows toiled at their mixers, creating a luxuriant digital swamp that included a sampled aria from the film Diva, a snippet from a Steve Reich composition, and a tweaked guitar riff from Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love." Ambient noise -- birds, waves -- washed over the crowd in hypnotic surround sound. Patterson blended trance with drum and bass, house with hard techno, and laced them all together with evocative strains of world music. On a pair of overhead screens, sound bites interacted with shifting digital imagery while laser lights swirled across the ceiling. The end effect was as gorgeously disorienting as walking into the mothershi p during the final minutes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Sandwiched between the headliners, San Francisco mixmaster Scott Hardkiss did an excellent job of whipping the crowd into hyper-dance-drive with an acid-funk set that perfectly bridged the Orb's trance music and the Chemical Brothers' rock-meets-hip-hop beats. Light shows and massive sound systems aside, you can't top a good DJ.