FLY ME TO THE MOON
the show friday was awesome– not a ripper, but a total soaker. i played first in the new laptoppy style, but i managed to sing one too– i just programmed three buttons to be regular notes i could sing to. i was happy about it, even though i had spent all day and the day before playing and kind of hypnotized myself almost into a fugue state. like every performance i do, i don’t really remember what happened– when scott told me later what he liked about it, i thought he was talking about something else entirely. tape “soon”.
second up was the GM/CF/JP jam, JP being a guy i just met that night (who introduced himself as “JP”, and not just to fit in with the schema). it was good and in two parts. i tend to think of a noise performance as being a single unbreakable unit– piecing it in two or more distinct chunks, each with their own arcs, was a cool trick to signify intent, away from “let’s turn everything on and groove on it”, and towards “this is the piece”. christopher had a (comparatively) huge synth he had been working on for some time, making those sssSSSHHUP ssssssSSSHHUP ssSHUPssSHUPssSHUPssSHUPssSHUP sounds i like. GM had a nice keyboard played in a “tape the keys down” style (with no tape), JP had some sort of homebrew apparatus, an effects array and occasionally, way far away crust vocals. really good, and spacey, and controlled, a hang-glider. i think this was their first show, after practicing in geoff’s bedroom for hours everyday for a week. pretty tite. that was in the living room and soon after in the basement, WORK/DEATH played a truly uplifting set. i enjoy talking to people who aren’t noise fans about noise– today i told pat shins that it was like death metal without the drums or guitars, just the ambiance, but i didn’t say that in addition to howling wind and thick sonic duvets, there was also, after a while, beautiful keyboards in emotional/revelatory chord progressions, like having a bold, totally shapeless idea in the forest as the sun beams on you and the wind blows warm but not unsettling.
finally uke of spaces corners in the living room, dan b and amy m os, guitar and keyboard and echo effects, perfect. in the weirdly glowing announcement email, in which i also said and not unfairly that this show was all people at the heads of their respective fields and at the tops of their games getting topper, i said that uke XYZ was “folk music removed of the influence of the embarrassing 60s folk revival”. meaning, it was harry smith anthology shit, personal in style and content. email back and forth with people extolling the merits of 60s folk, chiefly music-as-news, and fair enough. uke had this insight on the harry smith anthology, as a way to explain it’s proud unknowing weirdness: that it was the last recording before the influence of TV. well, we’re getting outside the influence of TV again, but in a high-access rather than low access way. right? that’s exciting! i tried to convince dan to change the name to “yukon spaces”, but he didn’t bite and was only half into it because yukon golds are his favorite kind of potato. also i should mention that both dan and amy were getting over food poisoning during the show and into the next day! rough!
oh, i put up a short clip of work/death on youtube:
well, you can see the keyboard anyway.
[...] Also a lovely day spent playing pinball in two different cities, and listening to/seeing this show. Thank you [...]
now I am going to bed, but this post makes me sad, since my wool blankets, quilt, & sleeping bag can never really measure up to a thick sonic duvet…
jake, saturday morning i went to the salvation army in spencer and found the jewel case of a cat and bird hospital CD with a different cover and a who wants to be a millionaire CD inside. i opened it up and your picture was under the tray. pleasant surprise.
alexis, that rules! all those cds had unique pictures in them. and both cat and bird hospital records (“get well soon” and “noise thriller”) are downloadable here.