Friday, July 4, 2014

Silas Stones Cat's Art MusikCircus

Going into the show at Cat's Art MusikCircus, my deal was that I must not even decide which chord / which key will start until the show is actually running.  This isn't a game with myself but rather a determined effort to try as much as possible to make everything in the set something that comes from right now.  The back tracks stopped working again and all I thought was so what.  They're good for spectacular stuff with lots of arrangement but they're boring as hell to use.




Now I watch out for the OGM factor (i.e. Old Guy Music) and that's stupid as it sucks or it doesn't but still I'm thinking sometimes, damn, that's some shit some old guy would play.  I really don't know as I have not been an old guy before so it's a new way to be neurotic about something.


The GR-20 guitar synth did not make an appearance but the new plan is to get to Guitar Center on Saturday.   The sounds it makes are incredibly beautiful so it's worth a few words on it ... but ... it's so beautiful that you can end up with something like what you will hear from paint artists sometimes:  oh, you just like the colors.  You're thinking, well, it's a painting.  There's nothing else there.  Then the artist leaps to his feet, slashes the painting and shrieks, "I need artists but they send me proles," and then he storms off to either find some coffee or commit suicide.

It's not an artsy fartsy consideration and it's a significant part of why Voodoo or lefty chooses deliberately to play with very little effect.  They work very hard to preserve the native purity of the sound of the guitar.  I suspect they would readily agree that you can make the sound of an instrument so beautiful that one really does become preoccupied with the colors rather than the story.  For my own taste, that's what I want as I have embellished the sound of the guitar in all manner of ways.  The trick is to do that while retaining what I consider to be the pure sound of the guitar.  This is very dry but a tremendous amount of thought goes into this by just about everyone who ever played.

Much of what I play is the reverse of the thinking that there is any story.  My thinking is not nihilist as I believe the story writes itself as it goes along but a very big part of my thinking is that nothing is preordained and this is what drives the importance of music that comes from now.  It not only shouldn't be pre-recorded, it mustn't.  There has to be compromise as you need to bring some kind of riffs in your head or you'll have nothing to play.  There's no possibility beyond Twelve Tones of Mad then.

There were only a few things tonight in which anything was pre-recorded.  One of them was "There's Something about Marigolds" and it's such a simple thing (e.g. D-C-G) but it can be beautiful.  My songs often have silly names but they're not trivial to me as people overlook marigolds because they smell and this in the same way as someone may overlook a mutt be cause you just have to take home a dog with a pedigree.  That's a big deal to me as it happens all the time yet there's nothing in this world that will love you like a mutt.  Pedigrees just bite you!  Plus their health is not as good, they're dispositions almost never are, and they cost a fortune.  Who wouldn't want that.

Disclaimer:  what you do with your own music is your own trip.  Whether you use back tracks or play a kazoo, I don't care.  It's good or it sucks.  I don't like commercial tracks as someone says she 'jams' ... with someone she never even met.  wtf?  As to anything else, let's hear it.  I was listening to a Turkish pop rock band from the sixties earlier.  I really am interested.


There was a first in putting an entire show on the Ride the Dragon podcast as I had never seriously considered doing that before.  So it happened ... and within twenty-four hours I had done it again in sending the entire audio stream for the RacerX Gullwing party to him.  Most unusual.  That seems the way of things but there are two problems:  I will run out of space on the server and / or I will get busted for using too much bandwidth.  I don't yet know whether people have been listening to it and will need to check before deciding anything on uploads from this show.

The set felt pretty good.  There's a generic volume problem in which it suddenly gets louder in a set and I've danced with this for some while.  There's no way I'm going to use headphones and it's an endless dance trying to get room audio to work.  Nevertheless, it was feeling good.  Cat said it sounded good and later on so did Yevette.  Those are credible reviews so I'm pleased with the show.

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