Inferno gig, aftermath
Playing the Inferno is always a safe bet for us. It’s home turf. It’s where we got our start. We know its quirks, we know pretty much what to expect from the sound system and from the crowd.
And that’s pretty much what we got. We had a few more swoony dancing girls up towards the front, and the percentage of people singing along was higher than normal (and Ryan Bannen even knew the lyrics to the new track). I got a startlingly large response when I gave a smartassed shoutout to sidechained compression. I guess there were more audio nerds in the audience thanI expected.
What I had forgotten was just how spoiled I am by smoke-free venues. The Inferno, by right of geography, is in a small island of not-Madison within the Madison city limits, and as such it is not beholden to the smoking ban enforced throughout the city. As such, before we even went on I felt like someone had rubbed my vocal cords with sandpaper. I have no tolerance for tobacco smoke anymore, apparently.
I of course remembered the vagaries of the sound system – due to the low stage and the room shape, it’s pretty much a guarantee that if there’s anyone there, ambient crowd noise will drown out any monitor mix. Seriously, Adam had those things cranked pretty good for us during soundcheck, and yet during the performance I could hear people in the crowd talking to each other – while not hearing a danged thing out of my monitor unless I pressed my ear down to it. Casual fans may notice my hunched posture during part of the show as I strained to hear the violin in the monitors.
Also, few clubs are really set up to host 5 electronic bands in one night, with all their inputs and DIs and mics. Inferno does a decent job of this, but there’s still a lot of patching and repatching that has to be done between acts. It’s not terribly difficult during soundcheck, but between bands, when the lights are down, the noise is high and the fog-machine has been running continuously for two hours, it’s a lot more difficult.
Still, all things considered, our technical issues were pretty minor. The keyboard decided to transpose itself up an octave, for reasons that are still unclear to me, and I couldn’t figure ut how to untranspose it on the fly. Jill just played around that – in fact I think it sounded better in a few spots. I hit a few *seriously* awful notes towards the end of the set particularly, as my voice started cracking. I’ll just blame the cigarette smoke for that. Yeah. It was the smoke.
I’d also gigged with Caustic that night, which was even more chaotic than usual. “Emmanuel Lewis Handjob” was just fun, though. And “Lady Business” just went completely off the rails.
I slept most of Sunday. And a good portion of Monday too (I took this week off).
