Announcement
I and the belly dancers of Wicked Temple will be taking our act up to Pittsburgh's North Hills, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the North Hills' third annual Arts in the Autumn festival. We're playing the opening night, Friday November 10, from 7-9 PM, and sharing the billing with a piano player. Rather than doing sets straight through, we'll be alternating for some variety. And there'll be visual art, as well as the ability to talk to the artist(s). Considering how great this went last year, we're all stoked to be playing here again.

I'll be playing atmospheric tribal ambient music on electric guitar and electric ukulele through the PowerBook, and I'll also have CDs for sale. The dancers of Wicked Temple will do co-ordinated dancing as a group, as well as individual solos. Expect mesmerising dance, trance-inducing music, and an open, contemplative mood. See you there!

2359 West Ingomar Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15237, (412) 366-0244. Saturday November 12, 3-4 PM. Map

Report
Another good gig here. Some initial signs were ominous, but in the end it all worked out nicely. I hit the road at 5:45 and got in a bit after 6:15--surprisingly little traffic, and not any trouble finding the place (as I'd been here last year). No dancers, however, and since Amethyst wasn't joining us, I didn't have cell numbers handy. I set up, though, and placed a call to Astarte's cell to give her my number (got voice mail). I had my own screwups, in getting shocked by my Alamo amp at one point, before I flipped the ground switch. (I really should rewire it as three-prong.) One other factor I'd have to deal with is that the g-string on the Kalamazoo is now bottoming out a little bit, but in an interesting way--it kind of sounds like a sitar, so I planned just to roll with it for now, but to do any other style of music, I'll need to give the truss rod an eighth of a tweak.

I'd have been rather concerned about the time except for the fact that we were sharing billing with a cocktail pianist, who would go on first. The plan was to alternate 20-minute sets, to keep things from getting stale, and this really saved us at this point. A bit after 7, I was leaving a voicemail for Amethyst, when suddenly Astarte appeared--she and Shanti had been calling back and forth trying to get directions straight, and while she got my message, the part where I left my number was garbled, and she'd been hoping I'd call back. Great...but she did get there, and gave me Shanti's number, so I could check in with her--in her case, Mapquest proved to be not so accurate. (In my case, I'd rejected Google Maps last year on the best way to get to the church--the church's own directions were much better.) So now we'd have at least one dancer for the first set, and likely two--our third, Vitriol, had car trouble and had to cancel.

At this point the opening had started, so--I said this was a good gig--we were able to check out the hors d'oeuvres. Soon, though, it was time to go on, and Shanti did appear, so we'd be at full strength for the set. I started a similar set to the previous week's set, again starting out at 140 bpm, and combining straight traditional drumming patterns with embellished ones and abstract electronica beats all at the same time. Things went reasonably well, and I kept the vibe and groove going, though at times it seemed to me that I wasn't doing enough actual live work.

At our break, Shanti and Astarte suggested that I give them an audio cue 10-seconds before set-end, and I decided on Ash's zils from the Electrobelly show, which I had cued up. We refueled while waiting for the next set at 8, and I decided to kick things up to 180 bpm, though unlike last week I'd do it with the recording running, so that the tempo change would be recorded. This one seemed like another good one, and some of the percussion textures were setting up into good grooves. (As happened last weekend, at one point the pianist came up and talked about what I was doing, wanting to see what the process was.)

The cue with the zils worked, and I brought the set to an end a minute early, but the dancers expressed some concern that they were getting worn out--the culprit was the fast, complex percussion programming. So for the next set, I took the tempo down to 130, and the result was much more open and contemplative. This was also from my increased use of chordal volume swells underneath everything else, and building up some higher-pitched swells in Looplex, and some melodic uke playing. I think the Delayifier repeats were a bit more present at this lower tempo and added to the spaciousness. I was even moved to work in some ring modulated guitar. Modulation frequency is difficult to set accurately with the pedal, but I chanced on 168 Hz, making B and E fairly consonant bell tones. I cued Astarte at the two-minute mark so she and Shanti could dance together, and then it was 9, so out with the zils.

And we were done! We wound down a bit, packed up, and got paid--a nice way to end the evening, and it's always enjoyable working with the UUCNH.