Here’s my modular synth set from my ambient/drone show. This is slightly edited from the live performance because of a couple issues with the raw recording).
Downloadable, so feel free to share.
live
All posts tagged live
30 mar 2007
I was asked to play a noise show downtown Cincinnati at a place called BASE Gallery. Instead of trying the stuff I’d been doing in The Black Fives, I wanted to do something new: play a dj set with pieces of sandpaper instead of records.
I used normal turntables & needles, along with a Kaoss Pad for effects. Someone asked, in a myspace comment, something to the effect of, “Wouldn’t that mess up your needles?”
In short, yes:
The blue needle on the left of the low-quality scanner image is a new needle; the two black ones were old, worn out needles i hadn’t yet thrown away. As you can see, the sandpaper completely ravaged them. 🙂
And for the record (no pun), I used multiple grits of sandpaper over the course of the set, and some with masking tape in a plus-sign shape across the sandpaper to make a kind of rhythmic sound.
30 oct 2004
This 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).
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.
07 mar 2004
The Black Fives released the Solid Phase EP in March 2004, and to celebrate the occasion held a cd release party at Mullane’s in downtown Cincinnati.
This half hour recording holds the very short (~7 minute) set of noise from The Black Fives, with DJ Empirical adding beats, samples, and scratching. After that, DJ Empirical continues to play for a time, interrupted by a weird keyboard/vocal piece by John Caldwell. Near the end of the mp3 appear the members of the Rhyme Swing Embassy.
As a point of note, this set predates the involvement of schädel in The Black Fives, as it was still a solo project at the time.