Hmm, weekend.

Took off work friday early to head up to Asheville to see King Crimson. If your
not familar with King Crimson,
they are more or less the inventors of prog rock, aka, the The Music That
Will Never Be Hip[1].

Stopped in Winston Salem to pick up scott & marty from Japan Air.
badger came along as well.
Then headed the rest of the way to Asheville.
The show was at
The Orange Peel, a relatively new large club. I’m curious to see how
long they can stay around, they seemed to done lots of work, and have
a ton of staff. Crowd was probabaly about 1000.

The show itself was pretty damn impressive. An interesting set, comprised
almost entirely of recent material. Nothing older than about 8 years old,
which is saying something for a band thats been around in one form
or another for almost 35 years.

The emphasis was on the newer, heavier, darker material, with only
one or two of the softer songs thrown in. This lineup does a very
good job with the dark and heavy stuff. Very impressive. Fripp
actually sat at the edge of the stage in full view of the audience
(he’s historically sat at the back of the stage, unlit, sometimes even
behind the drum kit[s].).

After the show, I ran into some old friends from Statesville I
hadn’t seen in years, so that was pretty cool and unexpected
(though, they are as big of music geeks as I am, so I probabaly
shouldn’t have been surprised…).

Fun drive home through the fog, but mad it okay.

Woke up at 4:30pm or so saturday and spent the rest of the
day doing as little as possible.

Sunday went over to badger‘s place and played
a bit. Took over the parker and the stick, and only one bin
of effects pedals!

[1] Or at least not by that name. I heard about 50 people talk about
Godspeed You Black Emperor at either the KC show, or
the fusion show thursday night. And GYBE is about as
“hip” of band I can think of (at least in the art student/record
store clerk version of “hip”).

First jam I decided to just go with the sounds that the came
up when I powered everything on with. A fairly ambient (for
me…) sound with lots of delay and something providing a nice
subtle (for me ;-> ) modulation.

Built some some noisy loops with the stick and lots of scraping
of strings with finger nails, car keys, allen wrenches, etc.
Then a short delay loop of the scraping noise pitch shifted
around to make some odd melodies, and build some nice
textural loops.

Some fun playing with huge reverb sounds on the wedge. And
some abuse of wedge’s tendency to pop when changing presets
for an odd rhythmic effect.

Then at some point or another some wide interval fun (real easy on the stick…)
that transform into sort of a “tweak the cutoff on an analog synth” type sound
by turning on the envelope filter.

Then some mucking about with a korg eltrectibe, and the khaoss pad, while
badger Sawed away at his Zeta upright with reckless abandon.

Fun was had by all.

I’m still sort of in a “stream of consiousness” mode instead of a more structured
“spontaneous composition” mode, but I’m getting there. I’m also still spastic
rhythmnicly, but hopefully that will improve once I get back into playing.