Ease, Himeji, 10/24/06

This promised to be an interesting night (but aren't they all). We rolled into Himeji late afternoon and Mike Shiflet picked us up and drove us out to venue called Ease. Mike was performing that night along with the guitarist from LSD-March, a pretty good Japanese psych band if you're not familiar with them. Blake as usual was going at it solo and Brian and I were doing our typical LSD thing (although we were billed just with our real names, to avoid confusion for the, ahem, many, many people who might think we were LSD-March, or something).

Shiflet and Michishita Shinsuke were an intriguing combination. Apparently it was originally supposed to be a trio with a saxophone player but he just didn't show up so Mike and Shinsuke went at it. It was definitely heavier on the guitar end of things, especially as it built to the peak during the middle of the performance, when Shinsuke pretty much took over and just laid into the guitar, a la LSD-March’s heavier moments. It's not that I didn't enjoy it, it was pretty heavy, intense, with some searing, reverbed, delayed chords and feedback shooting into the stratosphere. But at this point Mike was mostly a non-factor, his contribution (through the venue's tiny PA, a set of Bose speakers) being drowned out by Michishita Shinsuke's amp. However, when there space for Mike to breathe, some interesting things were going on, mostly in the background. Gurgles, sizzles, frosty blasts of sines, clipped sounds that provided an interesting contrast to Michishita Shinsuke’s more subtle playing when he was just exploring some delicate strumming or slightly more extended techniques. Mostly though, it was a constant stream of sound that could have been pared back a bit (and I don’t think the PA could have taken Mike's punishment if he really wanted to run it red). He suspected having the third person there as planned would have altered things for the better in terns of communication; it often felt, especially during that ecstatic middle peak, Shinsuke was on his own plane.

Blake was next. The soothing drones were left in Nagoya and he started with some dirtier field recordings and assorted fractured electronic sounds before shifting into some of his more usual territory of progressively louder and more sustained tones with a complex interchange of frequencies, durations and textures going on. It reminded me of large, slowly moving tectonic plates shifting against each other in unknowable patterns, the mammoth, inevitability of it. Due to space limitations, he never approached the loudness we've accustomed him to unleash, but that was not a bad thing. Much like the Canolfan show, it was restrained in the right places, keeping a level of menace tethered up, just one not knowing if and when that tether would break.

LSD finished the evening. Usual set up but the results were somewhat disappointing. I can at least speak from my end and say a few the methods I chose to employ and how to intervene fell flat. Some things that went on for too long, or other elements cutting though the mix too sharply, short of dangling out there, seemingly out of place amongst the rest of the surroundings. I think most of all I realized that I need a lot of work to do to expand my palette, or rather how I would expand the palette. I have quite a variety of source material that I employ during shows but I can run through a fair amount of material rather quick. The question becomes how to transform the regular, mundane, regular sources into something entirely different (what I might say could be viewed as extended technique on the laptop). I did head in that direction a bit for this tour, including a using Nord Micro strictly as an audio-in fx unit. Unfortunately I did not have enough time before we left to construct something I really liked, so the patch I used was somewhat lacking I thought. The Nord is flexible enough to be a rather sophisticated filter bank, an distortion unit and more and it is certainly controllable thru MIDI. So I decided to build my own controller box to help control MIDI parameters on the fly (though I'm gonna have to do some serious diving in MAX/MSP) to make that happen, but that’s a story for another time.

So in short, I was starting to feel I was working with a bit of limited range, which became more apparent with a partner to perform with. Once I get back home, its back to the drawing board.

Anyway, the venue owners were super nice, and the place was exceedingly small (probably smallest of all the we played) but a few people came out to check things out. Afterwards Mike drove us to his place in Ichinomiya, a hour outside of Himeji).