Played at Bickett Gallery last night with Phasmatodea.

We were supposed to be the opener for two solo acts,
but they had to cancel.

We were not able to find any one else to play on
such short notice so it was just us. We started around
9:45 or so, and played for just over an hour. By
far our longest set so far (I generally like to
keep it to about 25 minutes, since the kind of
stuff we do can get a bit grating if it goes on
too long…)

Thanks to base10, jay, and
others for coming out. Much appreciated.

I didn’t get a recording of the show, since Cubase
(the hd recording app I have…) crashed as soon
as the laptop came out of suspend and gave me the
spinning beachball of death cursor. So far, thats
one failure out of 3 live usages. I could of probably
killed it and restarted it in a 2 or 3 minutes, but
I always hate having to watch people muck with a computer
on stage (sounds an awful lot like what I do for a living…)

I suspect badger can provide more detail as
to what we played, since he’s much better at that than I :->

I forgot my guitar synth cable, so I was just using processed
stick/guitar, so the size of my sonic palette was reduced
a bit, but seemed to be okay.

Jumped in pretty noisy. I had not plugged the cable into the
Stick so had to grab it and because of the long chain of effects
I had on, it started making interesting noises. Started
abusing the cable to get weird noises before finally plugging
in. Eventually let that fade and did some more “normal”
playing.

Second piece I played guitar, a first for Phasmatodea
shows. Started out using the korg analog mono guitar
synth (as opposed to roland digital polyphonic one…),
but was having trouble with the signal level. I think the
preamp in the guitar might have a dying battery. So I switched
to a bright clean sound with some delay and played some
simple chimey bits.

I do not remember what the third piece was. I believe it
was badger making low ominous swells with the
Etherwave, and me joining in doing the same with the analog
synth and the low pass filter. Eventually a bit of call
and response.

Next thing started off with clean stick, and short,
shattered fragments of riffs being looped asymmetrically.
Then at some point I used lots of distortion.

Last piece started off kind of meandering a bit (well,
for me any way, I was being indecisive). Badger was playing
the theremin by attacking it with swinging cables. At least,
thats what I recall, the pieces tend to blur together in my
mind. Eventually the last thing [d]evolved into me doing lots
of layered blippy bloopy noises.

Seemed to go okay over all. Hopefully it didn’t bore anyone
(It was a _long_ set for us…).

I felt my playing was not really up to par. I generally like to
keep a balance between being “normal” and abstract, and
felt the stuff last night was perhaps too abstract. The main
reason being the way the pieces changed last night tended
to be sudden and swift (mostly my doing…).
My personal preference is to slowly but
continuously morph from one idea to another. Last night
I tended to be more instantaneous and abrupt in the
changes. But then, maybe thats good. Got to keep folks on
there toes ;->