Yes! Sooner rather than later The Big Mess will have some pretty darn decent videos to offer up. Right at this moment, the editor of the project, our own VoxMan Kyle, is in Vancouver, participating in the Halloween festivities of The Parade of Lost Souls. As soon as he gets back, he will seclude himself and edit edit edit.
We will post the results as soon as it’s ready.
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
Kyle and I are hard at work on some new tunes… a healthy number of new tunes. I’m literally adrenalin-rushing with excitement about most of them. There are some big challenges with some of these BUT I think that there is the potential for a good number of high end show-stoppers!
I think that it’s a bit premature to give out names yet. We hope to have some ready for Nov. 5th and all of them ready for New Year’s Eve. Lot of work ahead of us, but there’s lots of motivation, too.
We got a last second phone call inviting us to play at the Acme Food Co. booth at The Bite of Nanaimo. Not only was it really fun to play, but also the exposure in front of 900 people was pretty darn nice, too!
We set up at the back of the booth and it must have been a bit of a sound challenge for the brave Acme people. They had to attempt to hear what people were ordering over the sound of Big Mess tunes.
I believe that everyone had a great time last night at The Big Mess video shoot! I’m still buzzing from it and I can’t wait to see the footage. Kyle is going to edit it. Ahhhhhhh, that’s why he spent all that time in film school… for this very moment.
I just added an event’s calendar and a lot of new pictures in the gallery. Take a peek.
We are kinda sorta maybe as ready as we can be for tonight’s video shoot. A few weeks ago, at an official Marty/VoxMan Kyle business meeting, the VoxMan stated that we should do a video shoot. After an obligatory protest, I very quickly agreed that it was precisely what we should do. Both of us wanted Tash Baycroft to shoot it and he’s a busy guy. So tonight is when we were all able to fit it in.
Much thanks to Kyle and Heather for baking brownies… and to the Acme Food Co. for letting us shoot there. I’m into this, even though Kyle will NOT let me eat a brownie!!
Music is On the Tip of Your Tongue
Check out the October 6th podcast of last week’s Fresh Cutz on CHLY radio (scroll down to the October 6th show). Dylan Perry aired us for about an hour, shootin’ da shit and performing several of our songs live in the studio. After destroying one set of headphones mid-song due to over-enthusiasm, it ended up being a fantastic experience. Thanks Dylan! Rembember, you have to scroll down to the October 6th show, or else it won’t be us!
Our videographer is Nanaimo’s Tash Baycroft, the creative genius behind Naked Jams. What an honour! We are documenting a number of our songs from a variety of angles so that we can edit them into a mini-concert, individual songs, and promotional medleys.
What we need from You, friends, is to come down and be in the audience and enjoy a free show and some free beer and brownies!
Place: Acme Food Company, Basement Lounge
Date: Tuesday, October 19th
Time: 6:15 sharp – 7:30ish PM
Wear what you wanna, be who you wanna. Prepare to bob your heads, gawk & giggle and Wiggle Yobutts!
Tash Baycroft’s blog: tashunkabaycroft.wordpress.com
Naked Jams: www.nakedjams.com
Acme Food Co: www.acmefoodco.ca
Marty gapes at the VoxMan whirling his scatanomical solo
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?
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?
I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.
Narihira 9th century
Yesterday I indirectly knew that maybe perhaps I might possibly be writing my very first blog entry today, but I doubted it. And I’m hoping that you can delete blog entrys (and I seriously assume that you can…), because my only intention is to show Mr. Kyle that we do have something happening blogwise.
Hello Kyle, and welcome Our Blog.