Charmaine, Lo, and Me

[ateolf]

I was able to get some time in during the day to practice more for the show last night and I think I had just enough to get it together and have something decent to play with. And spent more time trying to find this xlr to 1/4" connector that my concept hinged on (finally did find it). Okay, so get enough time to get that together and make it up to the show. For once I had someone else do the door for a Lamplighter show, a guy named Kevin volunteered and he was nice and punctual and was a big help! Well, I played first. My set hinged on an audience participation idea where I ran my modular and a microphone into my line selector pedal. So anyone from the audience could come up and make some sounds into the microphone, but once they cut the microphone on, they cut me off. I provided a small box of synth-ish toys too. I didn't get a lot of people coming up to do it, but I got a few! The first was Jacques who played a sound from the virtual ANS synth on his phone and that one was this kinda seamless integration that almost sounds like something I was playing. After a little while, Charmaine Lee came up and spoke a little into it. She said "sweet surprise" (which is the text on Jacques's Chris & Cosey shirt he was wearing). Then Mark came up later and played a little with some of my toys, the Stylophone beatbox and the thumb piano. Finally, towards the end Jacques came back up and played a recording from a The Family Ghost practice of himself getting down a guitar part. (He said he originally wanted to play a recording from one of my other shows but was unable to log into bandcamp to get to it.) Anyway, so that was fun! I thought my own playing came off pretty well, considering! After I played it was Charmaine Lee and she was just fucking incredible! I picked up her t-shirt which I'm excited to wear. Oh, I guess I'll try to describe her sound but you really should just check her out. She does a lot of vocal noises run through modular, but really it doesn't do justice to try to describe it in words (or I'm not doing that justice, anyway). She packed up and left pretty quickly after she played and then apologized to me as she was leaving saying that their car had gotten broken into earlier in the day so things had been kind of hectic for them. It wasn't by the venue, she said it was "North Memphis" but I'm not sure where. Nothing was taken from the car so they were relieved about that. Oh, I almost meant to say that they went to see Herbie Hancock the night before too! She first asked about playing that night and I said I was planning on going to see Herbie but wanted to do the show and wondered if the date was flexible at all. She happened to have an adjacent off-night and switched the days and apparently liked the idea so much she went to see Herbie Hancock herself! So that's cool. Anyway, Cel Shade was next and had a really awesome, especially droney ambient set. She had the little crt/vhs combo again and this time was playing a Bible Man tape. That is...something! My favorite thing was how when it switched the "villain's" perspective, it said "villain vision" on the screen. A few times, sounds Lo was doing synced up with the video (like in an honest-to-god lightsaber fight in the beginning). Anyway, amusing and Cel Shade was really phenomenal. Talked to some people afterwards and it was a good time. Feels like I've been gone away from work for forever, but now gotta get back into the swing of that.