The Null Device Blog

Null Device
Parallel World Tour
“In another reality, you’d have heard of us”

Since I’ve got honest-to-god pneumonia, Null Device will not be performing tomorrow night.

As much as I was excited about this gig, it’s not worth hospitalizing myself over.

Wednesday was kind of a bad day on the music promotion front.  I received not one, not two, but three rejection emails from various festivals.

Within the span of 2 hours. 

(Admittedly, one of them was a long-shot, but still)

Okay, that kinda smarts.  I’m used to getting rejection letters – I mean, seriously, on the grand scale of things I’m still an enthusiastic amateur.  But three in two hours?  Daaaaaammmn.

You might think this would make me want to curl up and hide.  Oddly, no.  To me, it just means I need to work harder.  I need to “hone my craft”, to use the douchebag-speke of the musician.  Plus, it’s not like I can actually stop making music.  I don’t really have a choice in this.  Well, okay, I do, but it’s kind of like the choice not to scratch that mosquito bite – it takes more effort to not do something than it does to just do it, and in not doing it I might drive myself insane.  A little compulsive?  Hm, probably, but I don’t mind so much, because I derive no small measure of satisfaction from the process.  And the cats really seem to enjoy it when I’m down in the studio, so that’s a plus too. 

I’ve got a lot of work to do, I guess…

I’ve been sorting through my backlog of podcasts, and I listened to a little of the Bhangra and Urban Desi shows from desihits.com.

Man, I forgot how awesome those were.  Okay, sure, there’s a lot of cookie-cutter bhangra and some particularly british interpretations of hiphop with urdu lyrics and such in there, but there’s also some real gems.  For instance, I learned about the new Tigerstyle album.  Which I don’t have yet, but I will.  I also found out that Jazzy B has a new one out, collaborating with Sukshinder Shinda, and it is all kinds of awesome.   It is unfortunatley titled “Rambo”, and has a few annoying “skit” tracks that I could do without (or might make more sense if I spoke panjabi).   It does have the best use of gated tumbi ever.

(I also recognize one of the softsynth patches used on “Dilla Nu” but that’s neither here nor there).

My enthusiasm for the genre has been somewhat rekindled.  And as such I’ve started time-correcting a bunch of chaal loops I’ve got archived, and fusing them with some big meaty synth hooks.  We’ll see if I can hold this together without it turning into a terrible muddily-EQed mess – dhols really absorb frequency range.  Some serious compression is going to be required.  And probably sidechaining.  And then I need to find some exuberant panjabi guy to sing on it, too.  Still, it’s fun to work on regardless of what comes out the other side.  Call it a learning experience.

I went to Summerfest on Thursday with a few express purposes – first, roasted sweet corn dunked in butter.  Second, fireworks.  Third, Thievery Corporation was playing at the Miller Stage.

I last saw them in 1999 at the Iceland Airwaves festival, opening for Gus Gus.  They were, at the time, essentailly a DJ/sampler duo in nice suits, accompanied by a pair of reggae/dub toasters called “See-I.”  They were pretty engaging.

That was, of course,  9 years and 4 albums ago.  They’re a bit different live.

First, they had a pretty large live band.  Two percussionists, a bassist, a guitarist/sitarist, Rob and Eric, a saxophonist, a trumpeter, and a seemingly endless supply of vocalists.  In addition to See-I, there was another MC,  a Portuguese singer, a soul diva, and a belly dancer.   The belly dancer didn’t actually sing, she just danced.  A little.  Then left.  She seemed a little pointless.

The percussionists were insanely good.  One of them had a set of tabla, although instead of a dayan and bayan, he had two dayan tuned differently, almost like a very small tabla tarang.  The bassist was excellent as well, and hopped about like a man posessed – which admittedly looked a little funny considering he was playing low-key dub.

The performances overall were a little hit-or-miss, unfortunately.  Their more brazillian-influenced stuff and the more world-music stuff went well, but the dub and reggae stuff seemed a little off with that orchestration – and frankly the MC guy they had was a bit annoying.  Luckily they alternated between the various styles.

Of course I’ve gotten plenty of ideas from their lineup.  I’m not about to employ 35 vocalists or anything, but still…

The crowd was digging it, perhaps a little too much – SO MANY people were smokin the ganjaweed that was getting buzzed off secondhand smoke.