By Nathan Vaughan
Northeastern’s Association for Computing Machinery (nuACM) made an attempt to represent “nerdy music” at an afterHOURS concert Saturday night featuring folk singer Jonathan Coulton and two video game cover bands, The Power Glove and The Konami Kode.
The past week has been nuACM’s featured Geek Week. The afterHOURS show displayed the diversity of “geek” tastes, with the cover bands playing metal-style music in contrast to Coulton’s laid-back folk.
“They are two ends of the spectrum of nerdy music,” said Jeff Dlouhy, the vice president of nuACM and a sophomore computer science major.
Jonathan Coulton said he was originally a computer programmer. He said he quit his job when his daughter was born, describing the moment as realizing mortality. When asked about the sudden change of profession, he said he had always been a musician. He said he initially was only going to try being a musician for six months, and decided that if he failed he would go back to programming. Six months into his music career, he said it was going well so he decided to stick with it.
The medium-sized crowd milled around with a buzz of excitement when Coulton hit the stage. Throughout his set, people sang along to their favorite songs. Coulton interacted with the crowd, telling several jokes.
Coulton’s topics varied from song to song. An early song was about Pluto and its moon Charon. He said he wrote the song after Pluto was demoted from being a planet to a dwarf planet, which he described as “kind of a dick move.”
People in the crowd started to wave cell phones, and a few Nintendo DS systems were brought out. He also played a song that he said was autobiographical, called “Code Monkey.” A crowd favorite was the ending theme song from the game Portal called, “Still Alive.”
The song from Portal was a major draw for the crowd. Freshman computer science major Gary Katsevman said he had gotten to know Coulton from his Portal song, and from his music online. Coulton gained much of his fame when he put out a song on the Internet every Friday for a year between 2005-06. Coulton called the series “Thing-a-Week.”
Coulton, in an interview with The News, said he has not had much experience playing at colleges, but would definitely come back and play Northeastern again. Coulton said he enjoys performances when the crowd is full of fans who know his songs well and can sing along.
The opening act was a speed metal video game cover band, The Power Glove. The first song played was a rendition of the Tetris theme. The group went through its playlist and played covers of themes from video games like The Legend of Zelda and Mortal Kombat.
The second band, The Konami Kode continued with the video game theme, ending with a rendition of the Super Mario Bros. theme song.
There was a sharp contrast in the sounds between the opening acts and Jonathan Coulton.
The crowd Saturday night was heavily seeded with computer science and math majors. This fit with the theme of the night, with all of the video game and computer music.
Freshman computer science major Melissa Xie said she went to hear the music despite not being into video games.
The crowd also contained people who traveled long distances to see Coulton including Robert Carr, a freshman math major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., who traveled more than 170 miles.
There were also people in the crowd who were not majoring in anything related to math or computers. One of these students was Robert Brodeur, a junior English major.
“I was drawn by the ‘nerdiness’ of it all,” he said. “I enjoy video games and I enjoy music. This was a great fit for me.”
