Announcement
Yet another show (#61) is coming up, courtesy of my man DJ Translator (and Blackfish keyboardist) Greg Galbreth. He's launching the new every-so-often performance series SubLab at the Lava Lounge, and the first night is Monday.

I'll be busting out a couple of the W-related pieces (including the "Bush League" single, available at onezero music), celebrating the return of parallel ring modulation with some ambient droning Guitar Clouds, and just possibly entertaining a request. If you make the right one. (You know what to do.)

We'll also have Greg's new project AlphaBeta (keyboards/turntable and percussionist Matt Montgomery), Yves Jean kicking it acoustic style, and Andrew Nease doing...something. Not sure what it is, but rumor has it that some aspect of it will be big by one or another metric.

I'm not sure what the door charge will be, if any, but things get rolling around 8:30-9:00 or so. Not sure of the running order, either, but I suspect I'll be first or second. So mark this date on your calendar with a Sharpie, glitter lipstick, or Dave's Insanity sauce. See you there.

2204 East Carson Street, South Side. (Just hang a right off the Birmingham Bridge, and look across the street.) 412-431-5282. 21+. 8:30 PM, Monday March 29.

Report
An interesting night in several ways, although I wasn't satisfied with my performance. I got in the house around the same time as the other musicians, but before the sound guy, so I tried to figure something out. Turns out, the subwoofer I'd put my stuff on would be needed, so we set up a couple monitors that wouldn't be used. Gradually some audience filtered in, friends of Yves Jean and Greg, largely, one of whom happened to be an entertainment lawyer, so we had an interesting talk about some of the issues presented by my intended set-closer. I kept an eye out for a friend who was in from out of town. Yves had to get going fairly early, so it was agreed that he'd go first and I'd follow, which was fine by me, as I'd wanted my friend to see the set.

Yves's bag is very radio-friendly singer-songwriter jam-band stuff, and apparently he does a fair amount of touring behind it. I could tell that the audience was significantly composed of fans and friends from the claps of recognition that greeted many of the songs. Toward the end of his set I wandered out to the front of the bar, and there was Rick G, fresh up from the hotel with a work friend in tow, right on time! Excellent!

I began my set with the poem, as I've tended to do with audiences unfamiliar with my stuff. I saw a few people out there laughing, although it wasn't quite the response I usually get. With Yves having left, it seemed that many of his friends weren't into sticking around either. I launched into a somewhat challenged version of "Bush League," in which I was running a few too many VSTs and slowed the Ableton Live interface to a crawl--the processor use percentage was definitely higher than I'd ever seen it before. I also spent a fair amount of time struggling with coming up with interesting guitar lines while varying the samples, and swimming upstream through the molasses interface. In any case, this took another dent out of the population of the bar. Maybe these folks were crypto-administrationists or something. If so, I figured I might as well push it, and did the second W piece I haven't yet performed to a releasable standard. I wasn't fully happy with this one either, although I wasn't helped by the monitoring situation, which...wasn't--I was listening to the echo off the room. I'd thought of doing a guitar cloud for this one, experimenting with G, the successor to the late, lamented Girl program I'd been using, but Greg told me we were running late due to a late start time, and so I thought I'd wrap it up with "Red Fiber".

I introduced it by asking if anyone had any requests, hoping that some indie smartass would say the inevitable. This not being my audience, however, I was glad I'd briefed Rick on this ahead of time, asking him if he'd mind shouting it out for me if no one else did. As there weren't enough indie smartasses in the house, he did in fact have to make the request. So I played it, but it was difficult getting the right timing for the scene changes, with my having to monitor through room reflections. And I was done. There was a smattering of applause, and I hung out with Rick for a while to talk, although he and his co-worker had to head back to the hotel.

Greg's new project with the percussionist was up next, and they were quite good. As ever with Greg's stuff, one feels wittier, more urbane, and more sophisticated when listening to it. Check him out as either DJ Translator or with the percussionist as Alpha Beta. During the set, I was talking with Greg and Sarah's friend the entertainment lawyer, who assured me that I was within my free speech rights with Red Fiber, but woe betide me if I try to make any money off it. A point to remember.

Andrew Nease's set came late, but I was happy to hang out for it. He was doing the acoustic singer/songwriter thing, but with a twist--the over-the-top quality of his songwriting and performance could be chalked up to intense emotion, and to an ironic parody of the same. He obviously knew he was flirting with excess, so one couldn't laugh at him, but he kept the irony from being a cheap laugh by having genuine emotion in the work. I found it quite interesting, uncomfortable, smart, and funny. I dug it. Well done.

And the evening ended, late. As I went around the corner to get the car, one gentleman urinating against a dumpster shouted out to me that he liked the set. Somehow this seems appropriate. When I got home, I decided to do a canonical version of "Red Fiber" which would benefit from good monitoring. And so it was complete.