Archives

All posts for the month October, 2004

download: DJ Empirical, “Empirical Excerpt (live)”
30 oct 2004

dj empirical, halloween eve @ exbe showcase clevelandThis is just under 10 minutes of my performance at the ExBe Showcase in Cleveland. I was plagued with technical difficulties for the first half of the show, as I remember, and you can tell from this snippet: the right channel of one of my decks was not coming through.

The tracklist on this is essentially two mashups: firstly a Venetian Snares track (something from Songs About My Cats) blended with a bit of The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame”, and then into some exercise record, which blends into something from (I believe) Original Hamster.

That show was particularly special for me, because John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask stopped into the venue to play a few songs. It was the weekend before Election Day, and they were traveling around Ohio (a swing state) to try to just get out the vote. I was (and still am!) a huge fan of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, so I was incredibly excited not only to see them, but to share a bill with them, however accidental.

I was busy playing when they were walking around talking to people, but I did manage to get one pic with John Cameron Mitchell (too bad I look silly as hell).

2004-10-30: ExBe Showcase


download: The Black Fives, Live at Recycled Rainbow 9.0 (2004)
16 oct 2004

This live set dates from 2004, at Recycled Rainbow 9.0 in Cleveland, OH. At this point I (as Donald Spivak, or schädel) had only just joined the band, which until then had been pretty much what you hear in this set: dark electronic beats with added noise. Essentially all the beats and music in this set, other than a bit of synth stuff I played off the cuff, is Gabe (a.k.a. Harold Knockworthy)’s stuff. The noise and spoken stuff in this set is both of us.

Not long after this, these “songs”, the beats & music at least, got pulled into his Seeping Kind project, leaving The Black Fives as an improv ambient noise band. Recycled Rainbow is now an outdoor experimental music-type festival. At the time we played, it was in Every Man’s house. The event had a theme of “Classic Literature”, so I read bits of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine into a baby monitor.