ST. LOUIS – Hyperpop icons 100 gecs shook local coffee shop The Brewstory to its foundations with an intimate acoustic show that seemed to defy all known laws of sound, newly-deafened sources confirmed.
“I thought seeing an unplugged Gecs show would be a low-stress way to make me seem cool, but now I guess my hearing is trashed forever?” whimpered local 38-year-old Mark Disley, wiping a trickle of blood from his ear. “They came out with acoustic guitars, no mics, and some Rube Goldberg-looking assortment of weird objects that I guess was their effects rack, and within seconds I was pinned to the back of the room with the sheer volume. Half the crowd staggered out after two songs, and the other half, who were all, like, 17-year-olds, rolled their eyes at us and called us ‘little piss-babies’.”
Laura Les, one half of the paradigm-shifting duo, explained their approach for the show at The Brewstory.
“Yeah, we thought it’d be nice to take it down a notch from our usual shows, create more of a chill vibe,” said Les while hitting a cotton-candy-flavored vape. “But we still wanted it to slap, so we just put together a pretty basic acoustic signal chain. We aim the guitars into the horn of a haunted gramophone, then run the sound through the plumbing of the coffee shop, do parallel compression through 16 on-fire bassoons, and resonate it in the carcass of a sperm whale. Comes out at about 120 decibels, which is barely louder than a small jumbo jet. Pretty mellow, really.”
Audiologist Dr. Joyce Amoako offered her scientific opinion on the show.
“I’ve studied sound and hearing for 40 years, and I’m completely stumped,” said Amoako. “Hearing damage on this scale should not be possible from an entirely unamplified performance in such a small, intimate setting. A survivor of this incident told me he saw one of the so-called ‘musicians’ pluck a 40 Hz sine wave out of the air, perform a manual linear fold on it, then thread it through the ears of a man in the front row like floss. These are sick, dangerous individuals.”
At press time, the band were seen diligently sweeping up the smashed panes of glass that they had used for all their snare hits.