The Announcement:
Friday, June 29, 2001 7:30 at the Millvale Industrial Theatre. Tickets are $5. (Directions are available at http://mit.telerama.com/dirs.html)

Here's the lineup, in chronological order:

Farmgold ensemble
Toxic Spores <----------- my nom du bruit at the moment
Unfinished Symphonies <-- Robert Press (Mr. Funky)'s Organ Bar tunes
Brendan Zepp
Leo's Operation
Orgasmic Sound Explosion <- the headliner(s)

For the taxonomically inclined, let's say that my set will be "improvisational dark ambient." Yeah, that's what we'll call it.

This email is for informational purposes only. You're not obligated to come by, since...it may suck. (As the last one went well, the law of averages would in fact suggest this.) I'll be recording the set, as usual, so you won't necessarily miss anything.

So show up (or not), wear old clothes (or not), stay the whole time (or not), and watch out for the native rodent population (or not).

The Report:
For those who weren't there (given the 6 billion people on the planet, statistically that'd be everybody), the gig went really well. The promoter (Brendan Zepp, nice guy with a massive posse of devoted girls) loved it, the guy who runs the space (Manny) loved it (he made sure to get my phone number--he puts on many experimental and punk shows in town), and Robert "Mr. Funky" Press (who had recommended me for the gig) was into it as well. At the time I wasn't too artistically happy with my improv (hey, all new, unfamiliar samples), but on listening back to it, it does have its moments.

I'd been editing audio samples for the last several days, and put them together (mapping them to the keys on the PowerBook's keyboard, setting pitch, volume, and repeat parameters) right before I left for the show. Not much time to double-check, and no time to get familiar with this sample set and how to blend it. But...on with the show.

I went on second, and there were about 20 people in the audience for my set. (Nearly a 100% increase over the last one!) I wanted to get this on minidisc, so I clipped the mics to my bag behind me on stage, set the record levels low, and hoped for the best. (Unfortunately, the levels were still too high on the peaks. Damn.) So amp beside me, guitar on my lap, and PowerBook on a chair in front of me, I let the noise loose.

It was very hard to hear myself properly--the monitors were much louder than I'm used to, and I should have put the amp up on a chair or something, and moved it behind me. Usually, I was bent over the PowerBook or bending down to adjust the sampler or delay pedals on the guitar, and consequently it wasn't much of a "show" for the audience, I think. Most of the guitar playing was ebow (with a pick jammed in the strings for extra dissonance) to set up drones for the sampler. The digital modulation delay stretched the pitch around, and the amp tremelo gave it, for lack of a better term, a beat. Many of the samples were percussive and bassy (when in doubt, slow something down), which added to my levels problem, but I made the best of it. Some spooky sustained trebly samples balanced it out, with occasional speech samples for humor value.

At one point I had a complete outage--no PowerBook, no guitar. At first I thought I'd toasted the amp, but the tubes were still glowing, and there wasn't any smoke. I tested the PowerBook, and...nothing. Nothing substantial, anyway. I reached around and tugged on the cable, and back it came, into a kind of groove, so to speak. The guitar came back as well--probably another bad cable. (I'm buying new cables immediately.) Whenever the energy seemed to dissipate, I'd raise the pitch of a few samples, or adjust the delays to do the same thing for guitar--it was remarkably effective for building tension.

Eventually I came up on the end of my half hour, killed the samples, and let the delays run out. Applause, kudos, accolades ensued. No chairs or foodstuffs thrown.

I still have to get the hang of the MD recording--the mic pres are excruciatingly easy to overload, unless you have a -20dB pad or something, which I don't. I brought the record level way down, but not far enough. some of my peaks really distort. But it does give one a sense of what it sounded like.

The sets after mine were interesting--Robert's Unfinished Symphonies were unfortunately sparsely attended, through no fault of his own. It was as if everybody had a simultaneous nicotene craving. They missed a bunch of groovy, catchy songs--their loss. Immediately after his set was Brendan (promoter guy)'s set, which was very bassy guitar and vocals over very bassy 4-track backing. I think it was very difficult for him to get things going with that setup, but when he put down the guitar for the karaoke tune, all the girls in the audience screamed at his rock star moves. It was really sociologically fascinating, as was the constant stream of well-wishers coming up to him afterward. Nice, really popular guy. Robert and I recommended that he ditch the guitar and go all-karaoke next time, to take the maximum advantage of his rock-star power.

Leo's Operation bummed a cable from me for their set, which I forgot about before the end of the evening, so they owe me one. And at this remove, I don't recall Orgasmic Sound Explosion, unfortunately.

So I had a good time, got some applause, and it may lead to more stuff, which was my real objective. So we'll call this one another good gig.