Favourite Day is over again til October.
Got there just after 6, so plenty of time for set-up, though TSP was coming from work which meant that the door wasn’t covered for a while (not sure what I’d do without TSP on these gigs – she’s a lifesaver).
I’ve rarely seen so many gadgets and gizmos on one stage, and even then Leo only brought half his stomp-boxes with him! I’ve only seen Jason play acoustically before, so even though I knew he did an electro-acoustic processed thing, I had no idea what that would be, so he turned up with saxes and percussion and a great TC harmonizer an airFX, JamMan and another boss multi-FX. Lots of great noises.
As is customary, I kicked things off solo (No More Us And Them, Amo Amatis Amare, Scott Peck), then Leo joined me for the duo bit. He’s just been working on a project with a ranting mad new york bloke, so had these fabulous and ever-so-slightly scary vocal samples that he brought into the piece. Great stuff.
I had a feeling when I booked Leo and Jason together that the combination would work really well, and I wasn’t wrong – the combination of my setting up progressions, Leo alternating between playing the progression and punctuating it with crazy detuned guitar noises and Jason veering from gorgeous Garbarek-esque soprano sweetness to multiphonics+harmoniser squeals made for some really fascinating music, that often drifted from really ‘out’ to very ‘in’ indeed across the course of a couple of minutes.
The Recycle Collective works so well on so many levels – from giving people who don’t often get the change to play solo to explore that, through to bringing together disparate combinations of players who otherwise might not have met, as well as just playing gorgeous music in a gorgeous venue.
Crowd was fairly small, but I had lots of apologies waiting when I got in from people intending to be there who were ill or called away by mini-tragedies.
Next one is with BJ and Theo, on October 12th – put it in your diary now!
What’s the date of the one after that? One of these days I’ll be able to make it…
Lovely gig.
I was trying to figure out what it is I like about your stuff, Steve, and I reckon it’s that cinematic thing you’ve got going on. But it all sounds like the future too. Not in a technogeekery or fashion sense, in an aesthetic one. As if that cine-scape was located in some kind of time to come. Not a dystopian future, as they so often are, but one in which we’d learnt a few more things and were doing slightly better than we are now.
Sorry, all that’s a long-winded way of saying that it’s the optimism, hope and perhaps innocence of it all that makes it so charming.
The group improv bits kind of fit the thesis too. That’s an uncharted, uncertain territory in which we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen but can be fairly confident that it’s all going to be all right. We’re going to make it okay.
You leave RC gigs a bit more ready for the world. And that’s about as high a compliment as I can think of offering, really.
Wulf, I think it’s going to be November 15th… confirmation ASAP…
Simon – wow, thanks! That’s so close to how I conceive of the story aspect of it, it’s scary. You’ve just explained the feeling better than I ever could. x