Succeeding with Failure

It was a fun show last night in spite of things, in a sense going horribly wrong. First, I don't know, after grocery shopping and all I did a little practicing for the show and things seemed to be falling into place better and I was feeling good about it and all. Tried to get started on the artwork for this year's Memphis Concrète poster but still have a lot of work to do. Well, anyway the show. It was my album release show for Study for Synthesizer and Spliced Cassette Tape (on cassette tape) by American Damage Records up in Chicago (Jordan who I played a show with last...late August I think...or early September. I seem to remember it being a little before Labor Day. Anyway, yeah, Revenge Body played first and was good as always. He had a new song too. Sci Fi Industries was next and he did a set of "Sci Fi Industries plays Autechre." He downloaded those files for the MPC that Autechre published online a few months back (from the 2008 Quaristice tour) and built his set around all that. It was really awesome, you could hear the Autechre and imagine it was Autechre but it also equally had his own sound so it was just really cool and fun to hear what he did with that. The Pop Ritual was next and they had a really good and energetic performance, even by their standards. A lot of people came out so got to talk to people and all that fun stuff. The show flowed along pretty smoothly. A few people bought my tape. Well, so I have this fun thing for the show. I had patched my system such that there were no actual tone sources, just feedback loops through my modules (with the VCA Matrix as sort of the heart of all that). That's all cool and all, but something was happening and my Monorocket case kept dying. It'd work a little while and then it would lose power and I could turn it off and back on and it might work or it might power down again. There wasn't much I could do about it so I just kept going and acted as much as I could that that was part of the set. I mean, it makes kind've a cool electronics-dying sound when it loses power, but I didn't want just that one sound repeated over and over to where it was almost the only thing. But whatever, it was intermittent. I'm not sure if it was something with mty modules or with the power of the Hi-Tone that night (I mean, I've played that room before, I have more modules in that case now...didn't have this problem at home though). One thing I found after the show was there was a small piece of wrapper plastic inside the case right up against the power connection. It may have been shorting something with the static field, where being thin plastic its "connection" to the wires was flimsy. I don't know. After I found it, it seems like maybe that's the best theory, but who knows. I'll see if it keeps fucking up today. I also got there and realized that even though I brought my recorded I forgot to make sure there was an sd card in it. But Jacques had his recorded and let me use it so it got recorded (just don't have it on hand right now and will have to get it from him). While I was playing, this one dude came up to me, playing my set, and started talking to me. He starts with something like "are you have problems?" And I was and you know, in the moment you don't know what's going on so I thought maybe he was trying to help so at first I was like "well, yeah" but then, in a moment where the actual intended sounds were coming through, he said "is this what your music's supposed to sound like?" in a way where I realized he's just in the wrong place and doesn't get it and is a dick and I was like "yes" and then he said "are you sure?" and I said "yes" and started ignoring him. I guess he finally wandered away. I was informed later that before that, he was in the audience for part of it making out with some lady in a very egregious fashion. I didn't see that part. Well, I guess that's it for this show. It was a bit nerve wracking when shit started not working, but I figured I either just stop and don't play or keep going. David and Mary said they had a debate about whether the powering off and on was intentional or not. Zach said he wasn't sure and thought it might be intentional. A few people could tell it wasn't but thought it all sounded good anyway. People were complimentary at least. Zach said some girl came in and kept asking what was going on and he kept saying it was music and then she was just like "I can't do this" or something and left. I will say that for any show to fuck up it was this one. What I was doing was chaotic enough by its own nature to be able to go with the fucking up as well as possible anyway. Okay, I'll stop talking about it all now!