A custom Minecraft avatar representing Mike Kinsella, singer and guitarist for emo-rock staple American Football, stood with its back to a small crowd of onlookers.
Standing on a narrow stage, it faced a replica of the house featured on the cover of the band’s 1999 debut album, recreated with virtual stone blocks and fence posts.
“Does this avatar make my ass look square?” he asked the rest of the players on the server as the band’s next song came on the livestream.
On Saturday, a six-hour virtual music festival called Nether Meant, hosted on a Minecraft server, brought American Football together with some of EDM’s most-promising rising stars, drawing an audience of more than 10,000 live viewers on Twitch and raising $2,000 for charity.
By selling $5 VIP passes that unlocked custom skins and new areas in-game, the festival raised funds for COVID-19 relief carried out by the charity Good360, including the distribution of N95 masks and disinfectant products.
The festival’s 17 DJ sets delivered a refreshing mix of inventive, original music and hilarious mashups that satisfied the liveshow itch surprisingly well while fans around the world are sheltered-in-place to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Open Pit Presentations, which coordinated Nether Meant, had already hosted several virtual festivals through Minecraft including 2019’s MineGala, which featured two virtual stages with corresponding simultaneous audio livestreams of performances from electronic artists like neo-pop stars 100 Gecs and meme remixers like Poolboy.
Named as a Minecraft-themed play on words based on the title of American Football’s most-popular song, Nether Meant’s inclusion of the classic emo band made it unlike any of Open Pit’s past events, which had never included artists quite as established and prominent.
Both headlining acts, American Football and New York City-based electronica band Anamanaguchi gave fantastic performances toward the end of the six-hour livestream, playing some of the night’s best music while the Twitch stream and Minecraft server were most crowded.
As custom avatars hopped around between the American Football-themed stage and a virtual bar stocked with Minecraft potions, Anamanaguchi showed off their unique brand of lushly produced chiptune, featuring eight-bit remixes of Porter Robinson and Taylor Swift tracks.
Throughout American Football’s set, guitarist Mike Kinsella made several jokes about the unusual context of their performance, obviously very aware that his band stuck out in such a tech-savvy and meme-literate online community.
“So this is the future, huh? Honestly, I thought there’d be more pixels,” Kinsella joked, later asking the audience why they were so obsessed with a game that his kids “wear as pajamas.”
Eventually, American Football demonstrated that they can be just as clever as their audience if they want to, despite the fish-out-of-water dynamic. As the band played updated versions of fan favorites across their three albums, the crowd eagerly awaited, “Never Meant,” the iconic track for which the festival was named.
We thought we knew what we were getting when Kinsella introduced the next song with: “You may recognize it from your favorite memes.”
Instead of playing an updated or remastered version of their hit, the band played a fan-made remix that went viral near the end of last year which replaces every sound in the track with audio from “Super Mario 64.”
This brilliant and shocking piece of fan service took the mood from solemn appreciation of other material and firmly into outright jubilation.
Although several tracks in their set sounded a little too close to the original studio versions, bringing into question how much unique material the band prepared for the festival, American Football included enough banter and creativity to make the set feel like a real performance.
Unfortunately, technical issues with the Minecraft server used to host Nether Meant kept some fans locked out from the virtual performance space for the first hours of the festival.
Roughly halfway through the six-hour stream on Saturday, Open Pit tweeted that the technical issues were a result of unexpected traffic, stating that the volunteers running the servers were working to fix the issue and that “there’s more of you than we could imagine.”
Although server issues prevented some fans from watching artists’ avatars perform in game, the 17 DJ sets were consistently live-streamed through Nether Meant’s website and a Twitch stream.
Although most viewers probably came to Nether Meant for the headlining acts, the supporting performers were often just as good or even better than the closers, delivering exhilarating 20 minute-long mixes of original and unreleased music.
The set by Gloo, a musical collective composed of UK-based electronic producers Iglooghost, Kai Whiston and BABii, hammered listeners with an emotional rollercoaster through inventive production and tongue-in-cheek references.
After Whiston opened the set with distorted remixes of the meme-sensation 645AR’s squeaky rap vocals, Iglooghost took over with his mumble rap in alien languages over an insane blend of whining synths, growling bass, crushing drums and hyperactive pitched vocal samples.
By the end of the set, BABii led the chaos to a surprisingly soothing and dramatic finale, belting catchy melodies in a performance that bordered on operatic over a dreamy blend of soft keys, airy chimes and spacey percussion.
Not all of the sets featured production quite as overwhelmingly varied as Gloo’s, with some other artists delivering some graciously calm music compared to the intense dubstep and deconstructed-EDM.
Skylar Spence, also known as Saint Pepsi in the vaporwave and future funk genres, provided a refreshing cooldown with his set, an easygoing 20 minutes of pop rock and nu disco.
Spence’s relaxed and hooky vocal performances over dreamy blends of bright guitars and synths perfectly complemented the sweet nostalgia of the disco jams in the second half of his set, living up to the Saint Pepsi name with compressed walls of addictive guitar licks, punchy drums and dusty vocal samples.
While many artists developed fully realized presentations of original material for Nether Meant, others just piled on the memes and catered to their audience of internet jokesters to fantastic effect.
Dance DJ Drive45 crafted one of the most densely-packed hits of auditory silliness you’ll ever have the pleasure of experiencing. He mashed together the beat of Vengaboys’ ridiculous dance track “We Like To Party! (The Vengabus)” with distorted mumble rap vocals from 100 Gecs, chopped up the theme from 2001’s “Halo” to transition into pop punk from Sum 41 and laid gibberish vocals from Scatman John over the sound of classic internet meme “Hamster Dance.”
Drive45 uploaded his Nether Meant performance to his SoundCloud after the event ended, and if you need a good laugh, you’d do yourself a disservice by not listening to it right now.
If you don’t want to miss live meme overloads and emo rock ballads the next time Open Pit hosts a virtual festival, give them a follow and stay tuned. Nether Meant proves that they can not only put on shows that are godsends while fighting the boredom of quarantine, but that are essential parts of the online music community in general.
If virtual shows are the future of live music, at least for the next few months, we should be glad such talented organizers and artists are leading the way.
