S'toon
I was pretty excited to play a show in my former (May 98-Jan 00) home. Although I made some awesome friends there, my memories of that time are tainted by feelings of homesickness. I remember how surreal it was the few times people from home came to visit me. Going back with some good friends in a band would be even more so.
I felt kind of crappy. I'd only eaten red meat once on tour, in Lethbridge. My stomach was not being nice, adding impetus to my plan to quit this type of food altogether.
The show was at a French cultural centre. We were overdue for something other than a bar, so this was good. The past two bar experiences in particular had been fraught with bad vibrations. We met the promoter right away, and he seemed very laidback. We knew we'd be the only "rock" band on this bill, so given all of this we decided to play a little more loosey-goosey than we normally would. A couple of my old friends came to the show, and I found myself dropping a lot of disclaimers to them (lest they think we are a pure-improv noise band).
A visual artist was supposed to have worked with the bands at this show, but she turned out to be unavailable. The opening performer could perhaps have benefited from visuals, as he did noise from a laptop. The second performer, however, had the visual part covered... or maybe uncovered would be a better word. Musically, she was somewhere in the ballpark of T&TPs, but more "girlie". Her performance could be described as burlesque. I think women who do this type of art face a tough challenge, since there's the risk of sexuality becoming the sole focus for the audience. You'd have to poll the people at the show on this one. The third performer was the guy who put on the show - he did looped sound collage type stuff, and was really frantic to watch. He did a great job.
As stated above, we needed something really loose and free after our last few shows, which felt uptight for various reasons. We did ambient noise at the start (for maybe 10 minutes), with WE and Tobe at one point moving some drums onto the bar while Eb and I did our thing. I kept worrying people were going to think that's all we do (in fact we rarely improv outside of B-dick), but it was still fun and, I thought, interesting. W&T moved the drums back and we did an unreleased tune. I think the one downside of the show for me was the enormous snarl of patch cords, extension cords and power bars stretched to their limit, sometimes unplugging.
Next we break into B-dick... unusually early in the set. It went ok, I busted out the spacebeam again... we were loose as fuck. At this point we'd done about 20 minutes of improvisation with 1 and 1/2 minutes of scripted material in the middle - with the vocals unplugged by the chaos. I guess we could have ended then and there, but we all wanted to play some actual songs too, so we did another unreleased track, one from the purple 7" and two from the new album (ending with the title track... might as well). Although the set was a total mess in many ways, I felt oddly happy with it. It was neat to see CA and DM for the first time in years, let alone have them watch my band.
A couple of people were really into our set, and we got some compliments. There were maybe 25-30 people there and quite a few of them stayed for us. We moved a small amount of merch. We had offers to crash, but it was necessary to hit the road. We had maybe 65 hours to get to Ottawa.
I felt kind of crappy. I'd only eaten red meat once on tour, in Lethbridge. My stomach was not being nice, adding impetus to my plan to quit this type of food altogether.
The show was at a French cultural centre. We were overdue for something other than a bar, so this was good. The past two bar experiences in particular had been fraught with bad vibrations. We met the promoter right away, and he seemed very laidback. We knew we'd be the only "rock" band on this bill, so given all of this we decided to play a little more loosey-goosey than we normally would. A couple of my old friends came to the show, and I found myself dropping a lot of disclaimers to them (lest they think we are a pure-improv noise band).
A visual artist was supposed to have worked with the bands at this show, but she turned out to be unavailable. The opening performer could perhaps have benefited from visuals, as he did noise from a laptop. The second performer, however, had the visual part covered... or maybe uncovered would be a better word. Musically, she was somewhere in the ballpark of T&TPs, but more "girlie". Her performance could be described as burlesque. I think women who do this type of art face a tough challenge, since there's the risk of sexuality becoming the sole focus for the audience. You'd have to poll the people at the show on this one. The third performer was the guy who put on the show - he did looped sound collage type stuff, and was really frantic to watch. He did a great job.
As stated above, we needed something really loose and free after our last few shows, which felt uptight for various reasons. We did ambient noise at the start (for maybe 10 minutes), with WE and Tobe at one point moving some drums onto the bar while Eb and I did our thing. I kept worrying people were going to think that's all we do (in fact we rarely improv outside of B-dick), but it was still fun and, I thought, interesting. W&T moved the drums back and we did an unreleased tune. I think the one downside of the show for me was the enormous snarl of patch cords, extension cords and power bars stretched to their limit, sometimes unplugging.
Next we break into B-dick... unusually early in the set. It went ok, I busted out the spacebeam again... we were loose as fuck. At this point we'd done about 20 minutes of improvisation with 1 and 1/2 minutes of scripted material in the middle - with the vocals unplugged by the chaos. I guess we could have ended then and there, but we all wanted to play some actual songs too, so we did another unreleased track, one from the purple 7" and two from the new album (ending with the title track... might as well). Although the set was a total mess in many ways, I felt oddly happy with it. It was neat to see CA and DM for the first time in years, let alone have them watch my band.
A couple of people were really into our set, and we got some compliments. There were maybe 25-30 people there and quite a few of them stayed for us. We moved a small amount of merch. We had offers to crash, but it was necessary to hit the road. We had maybe 65 hours to get to Ottawa.
posted by the baron ash von foolishness at 11:23 AM
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