The Null Device Blog

Things went reasonably well last night, although as usual I misjudged the loudness of the “talky music” during the first segment.

I also started fading a bit towards the end.  At one point I beleive I said “that track was by Melotron…and I have nothing interesting to tell you about Melotron.”  I also incorrectly identified The Knife as being Scottish, when I meant to say Swedish.  I don’t know how I slipped there.

And I think I played “Life is Life” as my last track the last time I was there.

Anyway.

8-9:
Mylo – Valley of the Dolls
Venus Hum – Do You Want to Fight Me?
Cut Copy – Saturdays
Royksopp – Remind Me (live)
The Knife – We Share Our Mother’s Health (Trentemoeller mix)
Kings of Convenience – I Don’t Know (What I Can Save You From) (Royksopp mix)
Hot Chip – Boy From School
Junior Jack – Da Hype (feat Robt. Smith)
Kosheen – Wasting My Time (West London Deep Mix)
Arash – Tike Tike Karde (Balkan Fanatics Mix)
Joi – Asian Vibes

9-10
New Disc at Nine: Hybrid “I Choose Noise”
Hybrid – Dog Star (feat Perry Farrell)
Hybrid – Just for Today
Hybrid – Last Man Standing
The Go Find – Bleeding Heart
Imogen Heap – Headlock (live)
The Presets – Girl and The Sea
Iris – It Generates
Pet Shop Boys – Fugitive (Richard X mix)
Depeche Mode – John the Revelator (UNKLE Reconstruction)

10-11
Kraftwerk – Numbers (live in San Francisco)
La Floa Maldita – L’oasis
Parallel Project – Explicit (feat Tom Shear)
Melotron – Folge Mir Ins Licht
Neuroactive – More Serotonin
Lassigue Bendthaus – Cloned #7 (1)
Meat Beat Manifesto – Prime Audio Soup
Laibach – Life Is Life

It’s software upgrade season again.

Dammit!

Native Instruments has released upgrades to pretty much everything, and since I use a large number of their products, I’m eventually going to have to shell out the upgrade fees.

Of course, I will have to go from battery2 to battery3 – battery is the core of my drum programming, and they’ve finally merged loop-slicing with it. I have a dedicated loop-slicer plugin but it’s a bit twitchy sometimes and doesn’t always play well with multiple outputs.

And there’s also Absynth4…although that one can wait. I use Absynth3 once in a while but I haven’t had the time to take advantage of the really deep programming on it yet (I don’t have surround facilities, for one thing…yet). And FM8, the sucessor to FM7. Looks like it’s lost a lot of the retro DX7 charm, but they’ve added vector synthesis. Ehhh…I’ve still got RobPapen’s “Blue” for my FM needs right now. Still, for future reference…

They’ve dropped the “Intakt” and “Kompakt” sample players. I hope they continue to upgrade them though as so many 3rd-party standalone sample libraries use them.

Of course I have other studio desires in the shortish term – a better mastering limiter and multiband compressor, a bunch of flight cases, a new synth for the live setup…

And, I have this longer-term goal. I have some space in the unfinished part of the basement. I’ve nursed this idea for a long time, but now I think I know how to lay it out…I want to finish part of it and convert that chunk into a studio. Since it’s unbuilt, it’d be an acoustic tabula rasa – I could shape the room properly, hard-mount bass traps, build a vocal booth that’s more comfortable than a closet, build better instrument storage, and still have the option of using the unfinished part of the basement as a live room. Of course, there’s still my ever-present fear of water. Having had one basement flood and one exploding water softener (and a few spilled beers) I do maintain a fear of water ruining everything. However, I think a combo of a sump pump on an isolated circuit (done!) and a design that elevates everything a few inches (a raised floor, perhaps, or just a lot of shelves) I can keep everything safe. This will require planning. And money. And time. This may be a multi-year process. I need a new dryer first – I can’t record with damp clothes.

On the Excursions front, I’m well into a track that previously had been kicking my ass. It still is, sorta, but I have more of a handle on it. It heavily features filigreed spanish guitar work from Mr. Dan Clark, which is very cool. I’m having a little trouble with the vocals. They sound kind of forced right now. And I have some ideas but they require me to figure out some 4-part harmonies and even then they might sound just so bombastic as to cross over into “silly.” I’m not sure yet. We shall see.

SLC Saturday

Yeah, so we’d all gotten to sleep aorund 2am.

At 7:30, I woke up and sat upright. I spent about 30 minutes blinking and looking around, not entirely sure what was going on. Somewhere in that time period, Elizabeth woke up as well, and looked at me funny. Or at least, I think she did. I spent the time trying to get my eyes to focus, so really she was just this sort of blurry person-shaped thing several feet away.

Chuck woke up shortly thereafter, amazingly enough. He spent several minutes deflating the air mattress, enjoying it immensely.

Dan…Dan was unmovable. after a minute or so of progressively less gentle prodding, I finally managed to get a decision of “hike or sleep” from him. The decisiosn was, simply, “sleep.”

We’d already decided to forego the ADD panel discussion, so the rest of us piled into Heather’s car and she drove us off into the mountains. We stopped by a small runoff creek in Cottonwood canyon, where we all took some exceedingly goofy pictures and Chuck’s nose started to bleed from the altitude. Nevertheless, we continued higher, up past Snowbird and into the Wasatch mountains. Stopping at Silver Lake recreation area, we hiked on their standard loop trail and took some awesome photos, saw some neat things (no moose, though), saw lots and lots of blonde families, made a lot of stupid jokes, and enjoyed getting out and about.

(Yeah, how many hip rock-n-roll bands round out their shows with a nature hike?)

The weather was nice, the sky was clear, and it pretty much made up for the luggage absurdity of the previous few days.

After stopping for lunch, showering and packing at Heather’s, we said goodby to Heather and Pappy, drove back to the airport, returned the rental car, checked in and checked luggage (much more easily than at ORD, incidentally) and then sat around waiting for our plane to board. Chuck bought some souvenir salt at the gift shop. The flight back to Chicago was direct, although they made us pay for our in-flight snack. Part of the New Cruelty, I think. We landed at ORD, rather painlessly retreived all our luggage (although some rivets were missing from Dan’s G-tour case), and trammed it back to the parking lot, where Chuck had a joyous reunion with his pillow.

A spate of random pictures here and here.

SLC Friday

Woke up in rather a bit of pain – I don’t do well sleeping on strange futons.  Nonetheless, a little stretching and a short game of fetch with the border collie took care of that.

Dan and I wandered off to a nearby coffee shop for some morning caffeination.  We stopped along the way to marvel at various bits of architecture and discuss the joys of homeownership.  Coffee, pastry and random conversation is always a good way to start the morning.

Heather went off to work, and Elizabeth and I went to get angry at the luggage people again, only to find that our luggage had arrived.  There were moments of joyous celebration and a short drive back to Heather’s – no getting lost this time. 

Well, not until we went for lunch.  “Turn right at 500E” she said.   We turned right.  What she meant was “her right” as she approached from the other side of town.  As we drove around a small residential neighborhood trying to figure out where the damned cafe was, a few harried phone calls were made.  After figuring out where the issue was, we made it to the cafe, had a lunch that qualified as “schmancy”, and noted the large number of men in biker shorts wandering about.  We also noted the hilarious new-age flyers on the bulletin board in the cafe, advertising all sorts of self-help treatments involving fancy words like “quantum” and “resonance” and such with a very obvious ignorance of what they actually mean.  We were directed from there to a bakery filled with a number of rather decadent-looking pastries.  Naturally, we had to eat something there too.  As expected, Chuck placed a large order for tiramisu, pain au choclate, and some other custardy pastry.  What was unexpected was the large pastry order Elizabeth placed.  We sat around watching Chuck and Elizabeth eat bakery and talked music for a while. 

Our loadin/soundcheck was at 4pm.  Shortly before we arrived, the one radio station I could find that played anything remotely interesting began to play Erasure, which I took as a good sign.  I mean, it’s a synthpop festival after all.  Soundcheck was painless, we borrowed some keyboard stands from Randall (oe Eloquent/Section44), and I geeked out a little bit over the pretty nice digital soundboard they had rented for the event. 

The doors opened at 7, we had our merch ready to go, and things finally got underway around 8:15ish.  Monica Schroeder was up first.  I had no idea what to expect, not knowing any of her material before this performance, and she was quite frankly stunning.  It’s pretty downtempo, trip-pop sort of stuff, just her, a guitar or piano, and some subdued drum loops.  It worked really well and holy crap can she sing.  It was quite frankly intimidating to go onstage after that.

But go onstage we did.  Sadly, they hadn’t provded bottled water or antyhing to the artists so I had the single bottle I’d purchased, and I was entirely unprepared for the level of drought onstage.  About halfway into “Footfalls” I discovered that my entire head was starting to dessicate and chap.  Somilarly, the dryness was not good for my vocal cords – I swear I dropped some serious clams throughout the set but nobody seemed to care.  The crowd reacted pretty well, especially to the new material.

After we got offstage, all manner of odd things happened.  First, I had children – honest-to-god children – buying our CDs and enthusiastically asking for autographs.  Then I had my “Dan” moment where some guy came up to me and started a sentence with “Hey, I play electric violin too, man…” which nearly sent me into fits of laughter.  And then we rapidly sold most of our merch.  By the end of the night we had only a few tshirts left.

I caught the tail end of The Dignity of Labour, who seemed like a very polished band.  I was a bit ignorant of their material so I wasn’t singing along like the rest of the corwd, but everyone repsonded well to them and they put on a good show.  I also missed a chunk of Rename’s set because I was outside getting some air and watching Dan rant about BlutEngel (performer of the year!).  I was also getting a kick out of watching the kids who had shown up for the venue’s normal hip-hop night get really confused by the music within. 

I got to finally meet and chat with a number of people who I’ve known online for years but never (or in a few cases, only once) met in person, like ADD’s Todd Durrant, Breye and Jen from Provision and the redoubtable Brian Hazard of Color Theory/Resonance Mastering.  Good folks all around.  Really unusual crowd overall – a few hardcore gothiques, some middle-aged people with families, a college-friend’s ex-wife’s best friend, a few ravers, and someone’s mom.  I was a bit worried going in by the all-ages, family-friendly side of this show, fearing it might suck the energy right out of the festival, but these people are for the most part hardcore fans overall – so this translated to a lot of enthusiasm (and a lot of merch sales!).  Wasn’t a huge crowd, but they were pretty vocal with their feedback.  It was a fun night.

Returning to Heather’s sometime after midnight, we ordered a pizza (we hadn’t eaten since lunch) and…well, that was a damn fine pizza.

I fell asleep on the air mattress, and due to the lack of air in said mattress and my slight top-heaviness, I slept on a headfirst incline and spent much of the ngiht dreaming I was falling.  At some point I rolled off the matteress and slept on the floor, which stopped the falling dreams but left me with some bruises.

thursday:

We set out at what felt like an absurdly early start time.  I figured 4.5 hours would be enough to get us to ORD with time to spare, and I woulda been right if I hadn’t hit some traffic on 90.  Still we got in, parked, trammed into the terminal and had about an hour:15 until our flight.  No problem?  Right?  Well, they immediately sent us to the “odd sized baggage” queue where we had to stand around for a while, watching a family check about 24 baby seats and some woman from the east coast wander about asking where she could get a box for some gifts she got.  This ate up a bit of time.

We did, however, get our luggage checked with time to spare.

This of course was before we knew that some of our luggage was going to sit where we’d left it for 18 hours.

The flight was pretty massively dull.  And rather unpleasantly aromatic.  We had a stop in Kansas City, whereupon Chuck’s seat broke during landing dropping him flat on his back into the row behind us.  We were hoping this would get us bumped to first class, but instead they just duct taped it back together or something.  KC has security before the gates, so we couldn’t leave the boarding area without having to pass security checkpoints again.  Our choices were thus limited in terms of what we could do.  And dammit, if we’re in KC, they should present everyone who comes through the city with a complimentary plate of barbequed ribs.  They didn’t.  Instead I had a stale and rather nasty chicken sandwich from the concession kiosk.

Second stop was in denver.  Here we could get out and walk a little, so Chuck, Elizabeth and I went to find somethng to nosh on while Dan did laps on the moving walkways.  We tried to catch up to him, but Chuck gave up after one lap, and Elizabeth and I found it more amusing to take pictures of Dan mugging on the walkway than to actually try and keep a good pace.

Final leg of the flight was fine.  Dull.  We landed uneventfully in SLC, walked to baggae claim, grabbed our gear, I went to rent the car…and that’s when the whole “where the hell is our luggage?” debacle started.  After filing a claim and getting the hell out of the airport, we took off for Heather’s. Along the way, we passed the mormon temple, which for some reason had a large inflatable gorilla out front.

Upon arriving at Heather’s, we unloaded all our gear and collapsed in vaorius chairs.  Pappy the border collie was ecstatic that people were visiting him, and we found ourselves presented with a myriad of throwable dog toys. 

Heather directed us to an Indian restaurant downtown, where we went for dinner.  Oh man was it good.  I had a tandoori lamb, and it was easily some of the best tandoori I’ve had on this continent.  Dan had a chicken tikka, Elizabeth had some tibetan noodle dish, and I was so enraptured by my lamb boti that I’ve completely forgotten what Chuck and Heather ate.  Dan told a story about being mistaken for a food critic in europe, and we think the waiter caught just the “food critic” part here because suddenly we were getting a lot of attention from the waitstaff.

Heather gave us a quick tour of the area, including a rather sceninc nearby canyon, and then we headed back to her apartment.  Upon discovering our luggage was still not there, Elizabeth and I drove back to the airport to bitch at the staff.  They were as sympathetic as they could be, but were still ultimately unable to do anything for us. We did however get directions to the nearest 24-hour walmart (ugh) which was a necessary evil.  So, 11:30pm, south side of SLC, and I’m wandering around a walmart looking for socks.  On the way back, we got lost.  We missed our exit and ended up somehwere by the airport access roads.  We weren’t sure if we were east of the airport heading north, or west of the airport heading south, but a lucky turn put us back on the right track. We got back to Heather’s, and I fell into a deep, but uncomfortable sleep, and dreamed about luggage.