Noise

Last night nothingoth and I performed as a mostly spontaneous opening act for Anders Manga and In Tenebris, both of whom rocked the house. In Tenebris kicks more ass, harder and harder, every time I see them. That was a room full of sore asses.

Nothingoth had been asked to fill in for the opening slot, twisting knobs and pushing buttons on his noise making thingers. He invited me to help, so I brought my electronic piano and ran it through some effects. We probably rehearsed all of two hours in the week prior to the show with one of the more gear intensive things we've probably done--lots of little effects boxes stringed together with a mixer into which we sent all the sound, including my gear, plus a microphone, plus Nothingoth's noise thingers, in order to output a single stereo signal. The intention was a entirely improvisational show. Could have been brilliant, could have been a disaster.

The bad news is that the coordination of the evening's festivities was a disaster. Three bands show up with no sound guy. Eventually it worked out, but the whole "I don't know" atmosphere threw me off my groove. Combine that with a frequently linear thought process (I got get this done before I do this; then I can do this; next do this; never focusing on the big picture) and a healthy dash of stupid, I neglected to call krasota who was waiting at home for me to return in between sound check and going on stage. Faster than I had realized, that window of opportunity shrank to about 15 minutes. Fortunately we have two cars now, but Krasota did arrive a bit late, probably a minute after we went on stage. I do have a fair amount of stupid for which I accept blame.

The good news is the show was not a complete disaster. We probably broke even, between brilliant and disaster. I had to throw out some ideas I had, due to some potential for bad volume spikes with our gear hooked up to the house sound system. If there is a next time, I want to pick some beats with higher beats-per-minute, as I was running out of ideas on stage while improvising and I thought the whole thing sounded a bit more droning than I had intended. Overall, it was definitely a fun experiment and I think it came together all right, especially since it was such a spontaneous effort. I had a few compliments from people I have never seen before, so that was a little special. I don't expect random strangers to go out of their way to say something positive if they didn't like it. My favorite compliment: "You guys are the funniest noise band I think I've ever seen."

I do usually find the noise genre to be rather dull, despite the really killer ideas and sounds they frequently innovate. I had a few people say as much to me, but nonetheless enjoyed our sound. I credit Nothingoth for going easy on the "torture" knob, letting the sequenced patterns retain some space and clarity so people could feel the groove without being punished by any excessively brutal effects. Also, I tried to lay down some actual melodies over the noise with my playing, which probably made it more accessible.

We'll sleep on this for awhile. See how it feels. Perhaps, we'll do it again.