The Big Mess: Busking in Nanaimo

Who is having a blast busking in Nanaimo?
WE ARE!!! WE ARE!!!

The VoxMan and I got frustrated with having to make sure that our “case was closed”… so we purchased a group and individual busking licenses. Oh my god, we’ve unleashed a Monster!!

We’re having so much fun making music down at the waterfront. I mean REAL FUN. Dusk has never been the same!

The city of Nanaimo is very strict on what you can and can not do, so we purchased a small battery-operated but beautiful sounding system. Kyle recently purchased a cahon and the rest is history.

Last night, while we were in the middle of a song, our good buddy Mikaila Tombe appeared in the waterfront audience. As soon as I saw her, I had an idea… but it took all of us to play along… and it worked PERFECTLY. When we finished the song, I told Kyle to maybe ask someone in the audience if they might want to sing along with us. Kyle was on to where I was going with this, so he pointed to someone who he knew for sure wouldn’t join us. When they refused, he then pointed to Mikaila, who shyly played along… and then totally blew away everyone with “At Last”. I don’t think that anyone was on to our spontaneous little theatre act… even though Mikaila did a few more songs with us. Oh god, that was so fun!!

 

Another delightful show at our favorite place

Big thanks goes out to Acme Food Co. for being our close friends and most comfy performance space. We had a truly delightful show there last Saturday. Delightful not only because were there at least two tables of folks who came because they saw our newspaper advert and youtube videos (marketing really works!!!), but also because we were using some new gear that reallllllly improved the quality of our sound.

I am now using a TC-Helicon VoiceTone for something called Adaptive Compression and Shape modelling, and a new microphone: the Shure Beta 87. And let me tell YOU, a $300 mic can definitely be a delicious improvement over a $100 mic. The sound of my voice is now crisp and present, and I don’t have to make-out with the mic in order to make my beatboxing audible. The inspiration from the nice new sound and the very appreciative, happy audience led me to surprise Marty with an encore tune that he didn’t expect…. mwa ha ha ha ha!

Now we are looking forward to our upcoming concerts in April! Which I’ll post about in a few minutes once the posters are ready!

Ciao for now, friendly fans and secret admirers.

– VoxMan

Primeval moaning and wicked beat drops

This is VoxMan Kyle and Comox Valley’s Mantrakid voice-jam on aire during his Creamreefer show.

I am accompanying most of the tracks being played on this show. See if you can pick me out in there. As well as jamming, we get into some nicely deep philisopho-musical discussion about the use of the voice in music, community, and evolution.

VoxMan Kyle and Mantrakid on Creemreefer Radio

One man’s dissonance is another man’s pelvis thrust

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.

-Claude Debussy

Today was an interesting and frustrating day, that could open up some decent philosophy-of-music debate. The matter of issue is the extended jam-solo section that we are adding to the middle of “Tequila”. Marty picked out a whole shwack of drum loops that he thought would be good to dice and layer in Live. When I got home from work, I was to set to work on harnessing the chaos into some semblance of song. To me, an unfinished song is essentially pure chaos. An infinitum sprawl of unmade choices and possible directions. When jamming and improvising, this chaos is exciting to me, but at all other times I feel really unnerved by it. So I usually don’t start having fun with writing, recording, or producing a song until I am well into the ordering of the chaos.

Uneasy as I was today, I expelled Marty from my studio (bedroom) and set to work for several hours. And I quickly started really liking what I was coming up with! Satisfied that the chaos didn’t swallow me in agitation and inspired by the direction of the song, I invited him back to hear the progress. Within a few seconds he made a sour face at a bass note that he perceived to be dissonant. He tried jamming to the new section on his horn, but left my room after a few minutes. When I queried him on the back deck he said, sadly, “I don’t know if we’re on the same page, musically.”
After talking it through and listening to some variations of the bass line, it is apparent that he perceives certain notes to be wrong while I perceive them to be interesting. He hears unmarketable dissonance where I hear the cool parts that I want to thrust my body to. What IS THIS ALL ABOUT? Are his ears more old fashioned? Am I just a fringe musician with out-there tastes? I like well used dissonance. I hardly consider it to be dissonant! I’ve heard a lot of noise music and I don’t like most of it. That is not what I’m trying to do.

I tamed the Tequila jam-section way back. Now it is happy and groovy and there are no remotely wrong notes, but I know he feels bad that I am holding myself back from true musical impulses. I have some other ideas for the song including some DJ style cutting of samples, but I’m second-guessing myself about whether or not this is going to marketable for the masses. Masses. Pfff… Are we starting to do this for the classic ‘wrong reasons’.

Well, that’s a whole other debate I guess. For now, lets just focus on dissonance. Is it EVER appropriate to use when so-called ‘normal people’ are the audience? Or do I have to wait for the trippy music festival circuit before I can use the interesting notes?

The Big Mess prepares for Friday’s Blues on the Beach

This Friday (in two days), Kyle and I are going to perform on the beach in Parksville, BC. Well, that is a tiny exaggeration. We’re playing from 4 til 8 at the Beach Club Resort, and it’s outdoors, just a step or two from the boardwalk on the downtown Parksville beach.

I really have a very rough time trying to play trumpet for FOUR hours. Trumpet players aren’t supposed to do that. Anything that Kyle does to give me a break helps enormously!

We’re kinda hoping that we can start to use Ableton Live 8 for this job. Kyle’s got this very cool outboard controller for the program, the Akai APC 40, that makes it possible to change things on the fly while we are performing. The way I/we have previously done it is to use my computer-generated backing stuff, which sounds great, but is identical each time. The Ableton Live 8 way is the direction we’re shooting for: more fun & more creative.

It’s all so exciting and/but it’s all so new. We need more time to get ready! My grandest hope for this Friday would be to do 3 songs in this new way. Two of them are made of audio loops: In the Groove and Big Funky Mess… The other one is our brand new version of Tequila.

Should be very interesting and hopefully very fun.

Recently, I’ve been pushing the panic button over and over about trying to get prepared for both Friday in Parksville and our “official” debut gig at the Acme Food Co. on July 24rd and 25th. When we were having coffee this morning, Kyle said that the idea of being in a panic zone is totally counterproductive to getting things done. That was quite helpful for me to hear! I totally agree with him. We will get done what we can get done and we won’t get done what we don’t get done. It will be fine.

Have I ever mentioned how wise Kyle can (sometimes) be?