Monday, March 29, 2010

3.28.2010, oak cliff

showed up half an hour late for a 4:30p load-in time. terry was already there, of course. the kessler was decked out with an art exhibit curated by steve cruz of mighty fine arts. we set up our shit on the stage in the li'l room, underneath a big, colorful ice cream cone/globe sculpture which jeff liles later told me was made from a beach ball covered with carpet squares. hickey showed up and he, terry, my sweetie 'n' i walked over to cesar's tacos for some authentic mexican chow (open all night, which liles says can be dangerous) and sodas. (liles ordered some pies from oak cliff pizza for later.) then kat decamped for the fort to process her pics from friday night's stoogeaphilia/black dotz/bastardos de sancho extravaganza (some of which will be up soon, i swear, on her photo blog).

had to wait for the "poets on x+" versifiers to do their thang before we got started. listened to cliff notes impresario carlos salas flow some verse before we headed out to the li'l room to bum everybody out. we all really like working in the trio configuration. it's easy to listen and respond to each other, and we got a nice vibe and dynamic going on through all three sets we wound up playing. got some nice comments and a lot of questions from audience members about the instruments (terry's cigarbox guitars and cigarbox kalimba, and hickey's electric gopichand). we even sold some cd-r's (and gave away the rest, as is our wont.)

i inadvertently knocked the soundpost (my big sis told me the name of the part) off the violin, so terry's gonna have to repair it. duh. i think i'm going to stop bringing the telecaster to HIO gigs, and just concentrate on CBG and percussion. on this particular night, i stuck to terry's 6-string CBG and percussion (chinese cymbals, aluminum bowl and a cymbal that terry placed on the floor in front of the stage). i also used a handheld body massager and fan he brought to generate tones by holding them near the pickups.

my favorite thing i played was at the end of the last set, when i had four tones coming out of one instrument: a pulsing tone from my phase 90 (which i like to think of as the cry of the HIO owl), controlled harmonic feedback, and the tones generated by the massager and fan. unfortunately, it wasn't recorded because terry forgot to turn on his video camera. he did get the first two sets, though, and liles also shot some vid and melissa the bartender and a couple of other folks were shooting photos that we'll hopefully get to see at some point.

i didn't get to see all the other bands' sets, but i made it a point to be up front for pinkish black, the rubric adopted by the surviving members of the great tyrant after tommy atkins left the planet. jon teague is playing keyboards again the way he did in the post-doug ferguson incarnation of yeti, and they're still using tommy's beloved ampeg 300T. perhaps their performance was made more poignant for me by the fact that i knew they'd written all the music the week tommy died, but it was powerful and emotional stuff even without knowing the context of its creation, mitigated somewhat by some technical glitches early in the set. but once paul quigg was able to get daron beck's vocals up with the instruments, we could appreciate the music's full impact. hard not to look for the third man onstage, though...

i missed darktown strutters' set, but telethon were entertaining in a shticky kind of way with their '80s electronic sound, matching costumes, and faux german accents. i wish i'd stuck around to hear tartufi from san francisco, from what i've seen in lyles' vid. the duo play a metallic prog with loops that includes a xylophone and arvo part-like choral voxxx. impressive, but hickey needed to get back to weatherford to "slop the hogs." was good to see wanz dover from the black dotz (enroute to a dj gig), jason reimer from history at our disposal, and daniel huffman from new fumes. all in all, another great night at the kessler and the capper to the best week i could possibly imagine on several levels.

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