Announcement
Time for something a little different: I'll be doing a short set at Electrobelly, an evening of electronic music and dance, organized by Amethyst. I'll be doing about 15 minutes of guitar and ukulele over traditional hand drumming patterns...and what's shaping up to be breakcore. And I'll be accompanying the amazing classically trained vocalist Asha Black, so this is really going to be worth hearing. (True to form, I'm still working on the music, which will probably change between the time you read this and showtime.)

I'll be on at 10:30, but you'll want to check out the whole evening. There'll be DJs, a VJ, and many performances by different dancers--think of it as a bellydance rave, including an open dance floor later in the evening. How can you lose? By not going, that's how. See you there.

Friday, July 21, 2006, The Rex (South Side), 1602 East Carson Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15203, 10 p.m. - 1 a.m., $10 Cover, 21+.

Report
This was the first time out for the MacBook Pro, and there were surely going to be issues: two plugins I frequently use (Delayifier and Looplex) hadn't yet been ported to Intel, so I had to work with what I had. In the case of Looplex, I'd simulate it with the dub delay plugin from the same developer (mda). Other new things: the set would be more breakcore-like, faster, with lots more percussion than I've been using...and this time, with vocals. So it'd be interesting to try to keep from feeding back. It ended up being a tough ride due to the monitoring, but the audio was good. There was a nice vibe going with the vocalist, and the dancers were really on the changes. Not only was Asha doing great singing, but she'd also brought some zils which added another element to the percussion zoo I had going on.

The attention of the dancers helped me a great deal, of course, when I hit the space bar by mistake (I think the thought at the time was to get one thing to line up with another by restarting all the loops at the same point...but of course that stopped everything). The dancers saved me, however, by smiling and bowing, as though everything had been planned, and we got quite a bit of applause. Ash and I decided to do another piece, which went reasonably well also.

Afterwards, I caught up with a couple friends who'd attended, and they said they'd liked the set, which was nice to hear, though I was a bit troubled by the space bar screwup at the end. Other sets were very well done. At one point I was looking around for Amethyst to thank her for saving the set, and couldn't find her--she was in costume onstage, and it took me a while to recognize her.

The rest of the evening continued the thread of very impressive dancing, though at the beginning of the open dance floor, I loaded out and joined my friend Dan for a drink or two at a bar down the street. Overall, a very pleasant evening.