Toro Y Moi soothes sold-out Bishop crowd

Because of the entries from the blog Hipster Runoff, chillwave may be seen as a joke of a genre, but in Bloomington that may not be the case, as Toro Y Moi played to a sold-out crowd Wednesday at The Bishop.

Frontman Chazwick Bundick, armed now with three bandmates, was showered with love from the time he arrived onstage. He wore a red henley and circular, rimless glasses and was quick to applaud both the crowd and his band.

“I’ve really been on the chillwave bandwagon from the start, and he’s kind of the king of chillwave right now,” said Preston Surdo, a senior from Purdue who traveled from West Lafayette with two friends to see Toro Y Moi.

Other people from out of town at the show included Ball State sophomore Seth Johnson, who applauded both the show and the venue itself.

“The atmosphere here is really good, especially for his kind of music,” Johnson said.
From the time the squeezable synth line of “Still Sound” dropped, the crowd was drenched in a friendly frenzy of head-bobbing and twisting.

The group from Columbia, S.C., played in Bloomington two years ago as an up-and-comer at Greek’s Pizzeria.

Toro Y Moi soothed the audience with funky, spaced-out cuts from both “Causers of This” and “Underneath the Pine” in front of a lighting backdrop that looked like a rainbow on a microslide.

While a Bishop sellout pales in size to something like South by Southwest (Toro played there two weeks ago), Bundick said he doesn’t mind places like The Bishop.

“Actually I like this better,” he said. “Here you actually get some time. It’s all about time, you know, and here it’s much nicer.”