After a month or two of being a hermit and not making it out to many shows, I caught up a bit this week.
First up this week was a Robert Fripp solo soundscapes show in Carrboro. Very cool. Never seen a solo Fripp show before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Two sets, one about 30 minutes and another about 20 minutes, with a short Q&A in the middle. Second set seemed to be more along the lines of the soundscapes I’ve heard on cd before, while the first set was a touch more active. Very nice show.
Next show was a house show at Badgerhaus. Phon started out with a nice set. Next up was tzii. Very dark ambient laptop set. Next was The Master Musicians Of Hop-Frog. Synth guitar, laptop, vocals/drums. Very cool. Last set was Ripit. Nice live manipulation/remixing of a piece he had previously performed and recorded. Kind of nice being able to watch a noise/ambient set in someones living room. Spotted a flyer with some of the folks side projects listed. One of which has a new favorite band name: “I spit on your rave”.
Friday night was Dalek/Meat Beat Manifesto at Cat’s Cradle. Dalek was impressive as usual, but I think they suffered a bit from losing a DJ and moving down to a duo. The other previous DJ was very active and added a bit to the visuals, not to mentioning being responsible for the majority of the “noise” which seemed to be mostly sampled last night. Still really cool.
Meat Beat Manifesto was a lot better than I expected. I wasn’t real familiar with them (I think the only song I recognized was “helter skelter”). I wasn’t sure what to expect after the first few songs, but they seemed to pick up momentum towards the end of the set. Seemed like the early part of the set was more or less “dance beats with random movie samples with tempo synced echo” while the later part of the set moved to much more of a very impressive sound collage kind of thing.
The video integration was definitely the best I’ve ever seen at a live show. Well integrated into the music and the video projections, with the majority of the sound of a lot of the songs coming from multiple layers of video samples that were projected in sync. Very cool.
Saw a ton of people I know there, which was cool.
Now, trying to decide between staying around town, or driving to Winston-Salem to see a Negativeland documentary and talk at the Werehouse.
