Announcement
At the last minute, here's a gig. It'll be a free afternoon show outside, in Oakland Square, to accompany a neighborhood party/community gathering kind of thing. I'll be doing the solo guitar/uke/laptop belly dance tribal ambient breakcore that I've been doing (like at Electrobelly), and I'll once again be working with Steffi Brüninghaus, which we're both excited about.

So what'll happen? We're not sure. She may bring in a few other dancers from the troupe she's working with. I may get through the set without hitting the space bar on the keyboard. In any case, we're sure to entertain you, unless it rains. That's right, we're depending on the weather to hold out, which it just might.

So it's free, all ages, and there'll be other stuff going on there, too. C'mon by and check it out.

Sunday, August 27, 2005 at 4:30, Oakland Square, Pittsburgh, PA. Map.

Report

Ouch. This was in many respects a nice day, but I went a long way toward screwing it up. Steve Pellegrino said he'd like to sit in, which would be fun, and the general vibe was good. We followed a singer-songwriter who did a good, short set, and then we were into ours, but the problems started quickly. Sometime early on, I hit the num lock key and didn't realize it, and as a result my keyboard command to check on my MIDI configuration actually turned off quantization. I'm used to cuing drum patterns before the bar line, so that they'll start on the one of the next bar, but with quantization off, it's all instant. So that's right: I'm accompanying a dancer, and I keep moving the location of the downbeat. Great. Due to this distraction of trying to figure out what was wrong, I didn't spend enough time or attention on varying things that could be varied to generate interest. I'd also been told we'd be doing 45 minutes, but kept it to a hair over 20 minutes. Still, later Patricia asked why I played so long. (No, not too long; it just seemed that way, because I suck.) The next act up said, "Now we're going to play some real music." On the other hand, Steffi and Steve said they had a good time, and various people in the neighborhood lobbied us heavily to move in, so I must not have offended them that much...or maybe these were just latecomers. Other parts of the day were good--people were nice, the other acts were good, and just as the whole show was over and we loaded in the PA and everything, only then did the downpour start. The event timing was good. But it's still tough to get the bad-set taste out of my mouth.