Work

This past weekend was a crazy one that had me driving all over Virginia working shows, all country acts that I have never heard of. Thats one genera that I dont really get, modern country. Its really strange! The audio engineer with one of the bands wanted a TON of low end so i brought out some extra subs and he did not really seem to know what he was doing and still could not get what he wanted out of the mix so it was kind of a mess for a while. One of those engineers obsessed with compressors and gates and making live mixing WAY more complicated than it should be. I have become a firm believer in a more simplistic approach to setting up and mixing bands. I wont get into it here because im sure there are not to many people reading the blog here that would care or know what I am talking about and me rambling on to much about it would probably bore 90 percent of you to tears. Well, maybe not to tears, at least I would hope not. Eeeesh... now I'm imagining visitors to my site sobbing uncontrollably as they read what I write here... moving along...



On saturday, however, I skipped out of a show which was just south of DC and drove up there to perform at a show in the city with my friend matt as A Drop In Silence, the electronic music group I am involved in. The event was called simply X. Not simply X but just X. Not just X but X. Get it? Right. Well the show was all about art really and there were three graphic designers (as you can see in the bottom blurry part of the photo above) which were sitting there designing a poster for the event and all of their work was being projected onto the wall to the right there so anyone could watch the thought process behind their designing. Then there were photographers damn near EVERYWHERE running about taking photos of everything you could imagine. I also saw a few videographers milling about with video cameras, one of which was broadcasting the video live to his blog or something like that. And if that was not enough art interaction for you there was a live painter and a BELLY DANCER that was on stage for parts of the night. Oh, and then there was the music. In my mind it was a strange show to perform in some ways because the music was clearly not the focus. I felt that the musicians performing were up there and just kind of faded into the circus of media which in retrospect was pretty fun in a way to be part of this machine that was supposed to be fueled by all of the other creative things happening around the room. But looking back I find that most of the artists were totally in their own world during this event. Not a bad thing but can illustrate even when crammed in a room to create for people live artists can end up being a bit inward moving if that makes any sense.


(this was during our set)

But dont get me wrong, we had a great time performing, it was a really amazing event all in all and I am really happy that we were asked to play. I cant remember performing an event that was documented so well. During our long long long TWO HOUR set we had a constant stream of photographers and video cameras right there behind us nearly the whole time which I did my best to ignore and just do what I do when performing. We ended up playing mostly improvised music for the bulk of the night which was a lot of fun and something we have not done very often live and although the curators encouraged us to keep the music low key we did end up cranking up the volume and getting pretty crazy for a couple songs which they were clearly a little aggravated by but its something that we do and we were performing a show after all and want to represent who we are as artists just the same as everyone else so getting a little crazy here and there is something that is bound to happen.



So later in the night after we performed we drove a few blocks down the street to catch a couple of friends of ours perform down the street at another club. It really was just a huge coincidence that we were performing the same city the same night which was pretty cool I thought. It was great to see them perform as always and a nice way to end the evening with some glitch beat madness from Doofgoblin which performed one of the best sets I have ever heard him perform actually, and MachineDrums non stop dance party set that never disappoints.



After a couple of hours sleep we made the 6 hour drive back home so I could work another show on sunday which nearly killed me after all the other work and performing and driving and whew.... quite a weekend. I have at least two desktops I am getting ready to add but I just don't have time to add them just yet. Soon! Hopefully later today in fact. So stay tuned for more soon and thanks for being patient in these busy months.