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Crazy! Flash forward another few months, and suddenly I'm gigging again. :) More info about the past couple of shows if you follow the 'read more' button, but the really important bit for you to take away from this post is just this: I AM NOW ACTIVELY SEEKING BOOKINGS FOR PARTIES! If you're throwing a dance party, or know someone who is, I'm available and ready to rock.
So yeah - after the October house party show, I was "volunteered" to do a set at Sequential Circus 4, January 24th at Open Studios. Technically this was barely a booking, because I'm actually one of the people in charge of running the show (actually, if you're a live-pa act in Vancouver or around the area and you're interested in playing at Sequential Circus 5 in June or July 2009, drop me a demo!). For several reasons we had trouble booking enough acts to play the show, so a few folks in the crew insisted that I take a slot. Normally I refuse to play at any show that I have a hand in throwing, but frankly we've got the system so down now that there's almost no stress at all putting it all together. The show came together smoothly, but frankly I wasn't particularly pleased with my set. The reason is that I forsook all my previous setup and played my first-ever show with the Nord G2 Modular as the primary source of most of the sounds, and as the primary controller for a lot of the sounds also. I was doing a tonne of fancy routing, pushing sounds out of the computer (via the MOTU 828mkII) and through the Nord for processing, then back into the computer for further processing, then out to the soundsystem. Every single sound was routed at least twice! I wasn't pleased with the quality of the final sound, nor with the new music. See, basically I tried to move to doing more breakbeats than techno, and I overthought what needed to be done to the sound. So, with another booking coming up, I started ripping out all of my over-designed stuff and going back to more simple signal routing, and I went back to 4/4 techno - and lo and behold, it made a huge difference in the quality of the sound, the quality of the music, and most importantly, in my satisfaction with the performance. After a bit of a screwup with another booking (which I was admittedly nowhere near ready for), I had an extra month to prepare for a booking last weekend, playing the 2am timeslot at a large Burning Man party out on the Sunshine Coast. This time I was faaaaar more prepared, and the set went swimmingly - I had a good time, the crowd had a good time, and the party went off hard. The best part was rocking the house with a group of very close friends. :) Anyway. There's way more to do do, and I'm itching to get back to work, but I've just completely dismantled my studio! At the end of the month, I'm moving out of my comfortable apartment and onto a 40-foot "fixer-upper" sailboat, which will both occupy a lot of my time and simplify my life for the foreseeable future. In the next month or so, I hope to find time to bring vocoding and live vocals back into the set...
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