Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Reymones Punk the Circus

Last night The Reymones, a one-man band from France, brought punk to Cat's Art MusikCircus in Second Life and this was quite a rare treat as the elephants have always demanded a day of rest on Wednesdays and you know how much we all love elephants!  (Relax, the elephants are fine this morning!)


This is my only picture from the show as Second Life was not treating rey Redgrave well last night and refused to rez him.  A close-up picture of him would not have been at all fair under those circumstances but you can see him on the stage in the distance.  As you can see from my outfit, I didn't do much of a job of dressing either but Cat, as always, looked stunning.  There is also a Mystery Gentleman in black to the left of the stage and I'm happy to report that he has offered future work to The Reymones.

The audience was wildly enthusiastic about rey Redgrave and you can meet him as Reynald Melloni on Facebook.  You can also hear his work on SoundCloud.

What I liked the most about The Reymones performance last night was that he plays hard, fast, and aggressively on electric guitar.  What I did not like were the backtracks as they gave a great sound but they made it quite difficult to tell what was live and what was recorded.  Note specifically that The Reymones do NOT use cheesy commercial backtracks that were purchased from the Internet or some guy in a trenchcoat on a street corner.  They are all his own work as he is a quite-talented multi-instrumentalist and you will be able to hear that on SoundCloud.  He is most definitely NOT an iPod musician.

(Note:  I do not have a problem with the general use of backtracks as I have used them quite a bit myself.  When one plays multiple instruments, it is impossible to play them all at the same time so this presents a complex problem in live performance.  It is very attractive to use them as they permit a richness of sound that is typically impossible for a solo artist.)

Some things I would love to hear are Renald playing without the backtracks, perhaps with a looper such as a Boss RC-50 or similar and also I would love to hear him work with a singer.  He sounded a bit nervous last night so I won't review his play and nervousness is only natural given that Second Life was giving him a hard time and this was his first time back to the MusikCircus in some while.  I was fortunate enough to work with the Mystery Lady for some years in my musical life and if we were as good at marriage as we were at making music we would likely still be together.  I hope Reynald has better luck with this than we did!

So, congratulations to rey Redgrave on what was, for me, his debut performance at Cat Boucher's Art MusikCircus and I do hope to hear him again.  His talent is obvious and it will be fascinating to see and hear how it develops over time.  I'm sure we will hear more of him.

Yes, of course Cat and I danced but I already used that picture (laughs).

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