Announcement
This is an interesting one--my man Unfinished Symphonies/Mr. Funky has set up an evening of collaboration. The evening will begin with some solo Unfinished Symphonies on the phony organ, and then I'll join in on uke and PowerBook. The Tortured Genius (who might bear a resemblance to another member of Mr. & Mr$ Funky) will supply a baffling, enlightening piece of performance art, and I'll do a short set of guitar clouds to round the evening out, and celebrate the new incarnation of Peter Nyboer's performance software, now called G. And there may be an encore. (If you've been following my recent musical activities, you know which one it is.) So come on out, drink some coffee, and observe...a new chapter in Pittsburgh's cultural life.

That's this Friday, 8PM, at the Forbes & Craig Kiva Han. While there's no cover charge, we will pass a hat, or a bucket, or the desiccated husks of our souls. So throw a buck or two into the void. See you there.

Report
An interesting evening! I'd had a couple rehearsals with Unfinished Symphonies, to prepare for my uke additions to his work--the songs are always fun to play, and I'm not sure where he gets them all from--he writes a lot of songs, and I should probably release a bunch of them (it's something we've talked about). One of the tunes would have feedbacky gong uke processed in G, and the rest would be processed by various VSTs in Live--mostly two different flavors of distortion, some simulated tape delay, some ring modulation, and even some simulated Leslie speaker. (Behold the power of free VSTs.)

We had some soundcheck issues with the noisy Kiva Han head, but we figured out its secrets enough to begin--you have to start with the graphic EQ flat, and then cut a couple channels a few db to get the optimally minimal hum, and you have to avoid one of the channels, which is broken. We did the tunes, and it worked well, although the straightest of the tunes from the rehearsal (a fun one to play) was struck from the set. At one point, I looked up and saw that Ryan and Amadeo had stopped in to check out the show, which was nice--we weren't dependent on the couple of hapless patrons we'd trapped. Good tunes from Rob, though, and his rousing nihilist anthem "Live Music Is Dead" is a lot of fun. Generally I was just providing texture, although at times I was out of ideas, and went for uke feedback and the Hendrix eat-the-uke playing with my teeth. One of these is enough, probably, and I should have saved it for later in the set, but what the hell.

Our set over, the Tortured Genius told a fascinatingly raw autobiographical story about, well, being a genuinely misunderstood and underestimated genius while at the same time cutting a watermelon into a basket shape. Striking and moving, with some strong resonances. I'm eager to check out her other performances, too.

My solo set was up next. Matt Yaich and a friend came in, but left shortly after I started, perhaps on the assumption I'd be playing for a long time (I wouldn't). This marked the return of Guitar Clouds in a live setting, so there were some snags. I'd spent a portion of the afternoon working up a G set with presets for all the different frequency relationships I'd wanted to use, only to find right before I left for the show that G had amnesia about the presets. Yikes. I'd been testing these clouds and tweaking them to come up with interesting options, only to find them gone. So I slapped a couple together quickly, and hoped for the best. The first cloud, based on A, was unfocused and not terribly interesting, but the second one really latched for me, particularly with the guitar percussion I build up, with some higher-fret work over the top. Mr. Funky agreed, as well. Sadly, for whatever reason I didn't successfully record this part of the set to MiniDisc, but it was good to know that I could get something happening with G.

Ryan had brought his new Nikon D70, and took a lot of photos. One of me was conceptually interesting, though not flattering, sadly. It would have been nice to do a post-show hangout, but I needed to be up early the next morning, for a trip to Nashville--I'm having all my hits rerecorded by Nashville session musicians! Actually, it's a family thing, but I find the session musicians explanation amusing, and have been using it whenever possible.

Next show coming up in May!