Joaquin Gustav started calling it Healing Friday at Cat's Art MusikCircus as his performances are always very gentle, sweet, and romantic. In the picture he's playing for Morgana and I'm sure she speaks Spanish but I'm not sure which country. So here we have Joaquin, in Argentina, playing from Paris in a German venue for a lady who may well be in a fourth country and you have some mutt in the U.S. taking the picture. It's more than a Second Life, it's a life which would be almost impossible any other way.
There isn't a flashy report to write as Joaquin doesn't do flashy things. He definitely makes music for dancing and I can cheerfully report that Cat and I spent some while sorting through how a crazy (i.e. verrückte) dance machine works and now it really does work. There are many more dances available and Cat has found some really extraordinary ones.
Something different in Joaquin's approach is that he plays a tremendous number of shows in Second Life. This is important for anyone who plays in there as your time can go toward performance or in developing new material but it's very hard to do both. Joaquin's set won't change quickly but, to a large part, Joaquin's audience doesn't want it to change quickly. They come for the Joaquin vibe which is the love, the healing, the gentleness ... but don't you go without playing some Tangos.
Voodoo Shilton plays for us while I try to work up some skills as a virtual light man to get the show up to the level of his music. Voodoo has probably been playing for twenty years so it may take a little while (i.e. twenty years) to catch up but the lights are fun and you can see Voodoo inside a purple bubble at the top. Cat and I are dancing on the bottom left and that's Kasandra making the yellow explosions.
This wasn't an evening for any Vooquakes (you like that?? Voodoo earthquake??) in which he released a new original but it was smokin' in other ways. The Tetra Galactar made another appearance and we haven't heard from that axe in a while. Voodoo said he got it from some blue people in a fog.
The only blue people I ever encountered were very small and they had very large teeth. They wanted to kill me to take my cigarette lighter. Some dreams are better than others and Voodoo's dream with the Tetra Galactar was exceptional as he was using a capability in his looper to play the music backwards. He was then playing on top of that and this got into some trippin' to places where blue people just want to hear the music. I guess they already have cigarette lighters there.
OK, that blue people report was a little strange, I see that. In another segment, Voodoo got a request for a cover of a tune by Paco de Lucia. Voodoo did an excellent job of it but what's remarkable about it to me is that it flowed in his set just as if it were another of Voodoo's originals. Which is to say de Lucia don't got nothin' on Voodoo. The man is that good.
In a way it's unfortunate that I'm so admiring of Voodoo's skills that it makes me sound like a shill but I'll say again that I'm not. I like him personally as he's a very good human and he does good things. As a musician it's always important to follow people who are better than you or how would you ever learn anything. Voodoo isn't just the best I've heard in Second Life, he may well be one of the best I've ever heard anywhere.
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