L'Eclair and Charlie Chimi Made a Small Turnout Feel Bigger

Forty people, maybe fifty, is not really enough people to blend in. That was the first thing I noticed on Saturday at Bar Le Ritz PDB, where Charlie Chimi was opening for L'Eclair and everyone was standing a bit too far apart. The mugginess of the wet summer day was undoubtedly a contributing element in this.

Charlie Chimi and his crew set out to solve this immediately. The seven of them walked onstage, with Charlie pointing out how quiet it was in the venue, which they addressed themselves by filling the space with some stacked Afro-Latin percussion and a Spanish hook repeated until we all knew it. It was quite hard to continue noticing the emptiness of the room after that point. Their dancer worked with light up hula hoops, and at one point disappeared, returning dancing in a frog costume. The whole thing had this hallucinatory quality that you couldn't keep your eyes off.

One thing I strangely enjoyed was their habit of stopping. Multiple times, in the middle of a song at full tilt, they just paused, checked in with the audience, talked to someone near the front, sorted out a technical problem with the kick drum and then continued where they left off. These interruptions didn't seem to cost them anything. I would even say that they made the group seem more alive and relatable. By the end of their set, the band members were standing among the audience and an audience member was doing backing vocals onstage, and all these came off as pretty natural to everyone involved.

L'Eclair arrived with an opposing demeanor. The Geneva-formed band spent a decade creating instrumental pieces before brothers Stefan and Yavor Lilov found themselves finishing their fourth studio album, Cloud Drifter, alone after the original lineup parted ways. They filled the space by bringing together other artists, most notably the guest vocalists on their first album with vocals. The touring band is a collaborative effort too, with Charlie Chimi joining them on percussion. On stage they wore dark sunglasses, keeping their eyes mostly closed and playing with a seriousness that held the floor at a distance. The synths made enormous, cold, enveloping statements.

For a while the room stayed composed. People were talking, and the swaying never quite became dancing. Excitement came in short bursts, mostly when Stefan looked for it.  Then "ODESSOS" cracked something open. The tempo began climbing and kept climbing, and by the closing "Suite 2", the structure had loosened into an extended jam. The final stretch was played so fast that the room let go of whatever it had been holding. There was a guy in front of me who had been dancing dorkily and alone all night, entirely unbothered; by the end everyone was dancing more or less like him. Then, the band gradually slowed it down as if they were bringing down the beast they had created before letting us go.

In the end the forty, maybe fifty people that made up the crowd -- far fewer than either band deserved -- were standing much closer than how we started.