The Winter Garden at the World Financial Center is possibly the strangest venue I've ever been to. Essentially, it's just a large opening in the center of a mall, because it's situated in front of a huge, sprawling staircase in the center of the building that houses the shops and restaurants at the World Financial Center at the end of the island. My roommate and I walked in and were a little taken aback because of the set-up -- folding chairs lined up in rows, huge palm trees in the middle of everything, and no one was really saying anything.

Mountains was up first. The group, made of Brendon Anderegg & Koen Holtkamp, came on stage and said nothing. They sat down in their little corner, fiddled with their laptops, turned on a video, pulled out their instruments, and began to play. The video was gorgeous -- scenes from a rainy roadtrip, it seemed like. They showed shots of a lake, "moving" fields, the road in front of them, a close-up on water, wooden docks. I most loved the shot they gave us of an in-focus windshield with the wipers on in the rain, the moving road behind it blurry -- it was the part of the windshield that the wipers only half-reach, so half of the rain was being pushed away intermittently and the other half remained untouched. The music over it was interesting, if a bit repetitive after awhile. They used many different acoustic and varied instruments including guitars and recorders that, when combined with electronic noise from their computers, gave the performance an almost trance-like feel. At the end, both men stood up and walked off stage without saying anything after half-bowing to the audience.

Scanner took the stage after them. He introduced himself as Robin Rimbaud or, known to some, as "Mr. Scanner." An ambient DJ, he seemed far more comfortable in front of an audience. When the sound wasn't working for the first video he was playing, he joked that he had started with a silent piece. Then he launched into the same video with a huge, soaring, classical track played over it. So -- actually, it could have been a joke or not. Either way, his set took off. Scanner was wildly talented and showed it through the way he combined disparate sounds to create one over-arching sense of either dread or malcontent when the songs were played over the images and videos he chose. His set was much darker than Mountains', as almost all of the videos were eery in some way: black and white shots of a man sitting on a bench or empty parking lots with trash in them. He moved around the stage a lot more than Mountains did, keeping tempo with his body as he got really into the music. At one point, he lent his own voice to the performance, giving it a much more personal feel than we'd felt before. His was a set I'd probably see again.

Scanner and Mountains, two electronic groups, performed last night at the palatial (palm trees included) World Financial Center Winter Garden. I arrived late, following the ambient sounds past the closed up shops into the Winter Garden where Mountains were already performing before a silent audience sitting in black folding chairs. Mountains consists of two men who alternate between laptops, mpcs, and guitars to create atmospheric sounds appropriating field recordings. They blend these sounds and harmonic textures into eerie, highly layered songs. Mountains’ approach to their live show was to play the music as if no one were listening or watching; they toiled in silence on their laptops as film shot on a shaky handheld camera played on a screen behind them. Mountains' songs have a choral air; they gradually build from a quiet crackle into a wall of percussionless noise that never seems to resolve. As video of ominous clouds shot through a car's windshield played on screen, both men picked up acoustic guitars that when filtered through their laptops had the sound of malfunctioning machinery. Throughout their set, Mountains’ kept the lights fixed firmly on the projected images, playing in relative darkness, and, at the set's conclusion, both men left the stage without saying a word.

Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) gave a performance which was much more accessible to the average music fan. “I want to thank your for the opportunity to play in such an immersive mini paradise” he said, acknowledging the existence of the audience and our surroundings in contrast to Mountains. Scanner’s first song was a baroque sounding piece which combined classical strings with an operatic female singing voice. Scanner’s video pieces, too, were effective and evocative, black and white video of a hopeless looking man on a bench combined with malevolent guitar, and the sound of remote female voice suggesting the desperation of a frustrated city life. Just as Scanner had deliberately connected to the audience; he also gave a human warmth to his music by making live sounds and humming over the instrumentation. Where Mountains played music in a seemingly emotionless, sullen fashion, Scanner bounced about the stage energetically tapping his MPC as a video played overhead. Scanner uses audio from disparate sources: voicemail machines, acoustic instruments, electronic instruments, and field recordings. While the sources are disparate, the music is unified by Scanner's ability to create a soundscape all his own. The crowd was silent, but appreciative as Scanner concluded his set with a piece that featured a voice that sounded as if it was plucked from a commercial on 60’s radio, and a video featuring still shots of a desert.