Announcement
As if the Club Cafe gig isn't enough, the next night I'll be playing a solo set at the revived Re:PULSE series, in the expanded Kiva Han at Forbes and Craig near the museum. This will be a guitar-and-PowerBook exploration, and my first time out solo with Ableton Live as my software, so expect...something different, but you were expecting that anyway. It might be an audio retrospective of 2003. Also on the bill are the tastefully doomy Requiem and the powerful, unpredictable noise and/or ambience of Manherringbone. It looks like I'll be up first, so come by early.

Three sets in two nights! You can follow me around like I'm the Grateful Dead or something, except you can keep your job, bathe regularly, and sleep in your usual bed with full control over your environment. Plus, no patchouli-drenched hallucinating weirdos. (There will, however, most likely be weirdos of other varieties, should you require them.)

Tuesday, January 27, 2004, 8PM. Kiva Han coffeehouse, Forbes & Craig, Oakland. All ages, $2.

Report
This was a fun one. Not all pieces were successful, but the ones that were, really were. As with last night, the weather was rather nasty, and the two other scheduled acts couldn't make it. Instead, we got Jordan Decay (who laid down some interesting literary goth action) and my dawg Kerry Holocaust from the Circuits of Steel tour. Good to see him again.

Steve Pellegrino and I had planned a Surprise for the evening, but the weather being what it was (snowy and icy), he couldn't make it, which was fine. I was more concerned about the pieces I was going to do, since the night before was the last gasp of the Girl software I'd been using. I spent a chunk of the day on trying to compile an OS X VST from open ring modulator source code, but, sadly, no luck. I was having promising, but not definitively successful, results, meaning that guitar clouds were out of the question. So I spent some quality time with Ableton Live working up some new pieces, most notably a new piece with a bunch of recent Bush samples. That wasn't quite enough for a whole set, though, so I also worked up an audio diary of 2003, with the thought that I could use it both for a piece I'd be contributing to Re-Record Romzine, and for an audio installation I'd have at the upcoming Sonic Bridge symposium. We'd see how it would go.

As the drive was a few short blocks and the MINI's great in snow, getting there was no problem. I snagged a bite to eat (a very tasty veggie sandwich on foccacia) and set up. It was great reconnecting with Kerry, who's back in town after several sojourns farther afield. I chatted with Jordan Decay a bit as well, before deciding to get my set rolling.

While attendance was sparse, the weather still being bad, there were more paying audients than had been at Club Cafe the night before. As most of them were new faces, I opted to start with the poem Tell Ya One Thing, which got the appropriate surprise and laughter, and works well as a gesture of non-self-important goodwill. I opted to do the new Bush piece next, which went over very well. I set up some low E volume swells into the Line6, which I had playing into Live while I manipulated it with VSTs and introduced the samples. The more amusing edits elicited the right response--some vocal chuckling, and Manny shaking with laughter--although I sadly succumbed to the temptation to re-play some of the best ones. Still, it worked, as did my occasional guitar accents. The end was something of a revelation for me, as it was much more IDM than I've been doing. I'd tortured some breakbeats into unrecognizability with Live's envelope editing capability, and then applied a buffer override. After swirling the XY controller around for a while, I found a nice tonal stutter, and added some modal guitar and some E minor chords. Nice.

The next piece wasn't so successful, because the environmental samples (a lot of DC and NY subways) devolved into a pool of white noise. For the last piece, I'd wanted to do a guitar cloud, but found that Girl wouldn't launch. Or it would launch, but crap out on me whenever I'd go to adjust the delay feedback. Oh, well. I quickly dropped a bunch of old movie samples into Live, and made a bunch of noise with the Line6 and VSTs. And then I called it a set. While I might have lost some goodwill in the second part of the set, the first part was good enough that I managed to sell a Death Pig CD to fellow ambient noisemaker Ryan Unks, and get some good feedback from other folks as well. Not bad at all.

Jordan and Kerry were both good, and this time Kerry didn't break anything. (I'd made sure to move my gear out from the performance space before he came on.) Another nice thing was finally to see a copy of Greg Gillis's new Girl Talk CD, on which I'm credited with photography. And he did use a lot of the photos from the tour. Anyway, good vibes all around. Afterwards, Manny split the door (hey, more cash!) and I gave him a ride over to his new pad. And I was home at a reasonable hour, too--a good night.