The Null Device Blog

Last night we played a gig at The Frequency here in Madison.  It was the anniversary show for the local Dane101.com blog.  Jesse, the mastermind of Dane101, pretty much pulled in four wildly different bands to do four wildly different things, and the end result was pretty excellent.

It was a bittersweet gig for us, though.  After 7 years in the band – almost to the day – our valiant bassist and donut-finder-general Chuck is going on an indefinite hiatus to work on a new project with his wife.  Namely, a baby.  We wish him a bon voyage, although it’s not a goodbye kind of thing because I see him every week.  But it’s been fun.  Chuck was the first guy recruited for the live band, and he’s stuck with it through a lot of really unusual gigs, long drives, and strange occurrences.   We’ll miss you, Chuck.

Snif.

Okay, moving on.

First band was Little Red Wolf, who do a sort of alt-pop-country-americana-folk-rock kind of thing.  Hard to explain.  They had vocal harmonies to die for and catchy, catchy tunes.  They could switch from sweet, airy ballads to rock on a dime.

Next were veterans German Art Students, who have been playing brainy, jangly new-wavy pop music for well over a decade.  I’ve seen these guys live a number of times, and they’re always a lot of fun.  This was their first gig since the departure of their bassist – I know how they feel – so they were rocking as a trio.  It changed the sound of a number of their songs, but “Civil War Reenactor” and “Steve Vai Boyfriend” were still pretty badassed.

Third was Guante and Big Cats, a hiphop collaboration from the Twin Cities. They were…wow.  Just…wow.  Big Cats had some really excellent glitchy hiphop beats, and Guante’s politically-charged spoken-word was hard-hitting and incisive.  Really, really dig this.

We were up last.  We had a few problems.  Like…I forgot the words to a song I’ve song nearly every week since 2004.  And the drum mic on Elizabeth’s big darbuka kept feeding back.  But we soldiered on, and had a dhol party for “Blow My Mind” with the ever-entertaining Emily Mills from Little Red Wolf being our ersatz dholi.  Lots of fun.

So, happy birthday to Dane101, bon voyage to Chuck, and thanks to Jesse and the other bands!

Out of the blue I received a pair of tickets to see Mr. Peter Murphy in Milwaukee.   I’ve seen him on a number of different tours, going back to 1995.  I’ve seen a pop tour, a rock tour, an acoustic tour, a turkish-ethnic tour…and now he’s back doing a kind of rock thing again.

It gives me hope, though – the guy’s in his early 50′s and he can still just bring it onstage.  His voice sounds as good as ever, he’s still bounding about the stage like a 19-year old, and he’s still doing his crazy bendy dances onstage.  Okay, it looks a little weird to have a 52-year-old skipping around a stage to a Bauhaus song, but aside from that, he still has an enviable amount of stage energy and presence.  His backing band seemed to be roughly half his age, too.

He also did possibly the best cover a Joy Division song I’ve heard.

Sadly, the show was not particularly well-attended.  The venue did a fairly piss-poor job of promoting the show, which was sad.  Still, it was also nice that even given the low attendance he didn’t just phone it in.

I admit I haven’t been the rabid Peter Murphy fanboy I was back in the mid 90′s, but I still have a healthy respect for the dude, and damn can he perform.

Since Gearfest was a tradeshow, you know that there would be a lot of free “stuff” from vendors.

A few notes:

1) Rode gave me a tshirt.  They assumed I was a “large.”  While I’m flattered, I am not a large.  Sigh.

2) Moog gave me a tshirt.  They were out of anything other than XXL.  So it’s a bit big.  Oh well.  But the “Keep Your Hands Off My Theremin” slogan makes me giggle.  Okay, yeah, I’m a nerd.

3) The Moog Music pocket protector  is simultaneously the most useless and incredibly awesome giveaway ever.

4) Ableton and AEA both gave out mousepads.  They know their markets.  I already have an Ableton mousepad, though.

5) Sweetwater themselves gave us bags to keep it all in along with catalogs and schedules, and as a particularly nice touch, loaded the bags with candy.  Sadly, my candy was limited entirely to Tootsie Rolls and Bit O’Honey, while Dan scored a few rolls of Smarties, which is free-candy gold.

6) Have I mentioned how awesome free chilled bottled water was?

7) it’s not schwag, but I found it beyond hilarious that the SSL demo played Peter Gabriel.

And some blurry cameraphone photos (more on my flickr):

Read more

This past weekend, Dan and I headed down to Fort Wayne, IN to Sweetwater Gearfest, a big ol’ trade show/convention/workshop for audio nerds.  And both of us being audio nerds, this was a good place for us.

Never having been to one before, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Would it be just a lot of glorified sales pitches by Sweetwater staff?  Would it be a big meet-n-greet?  Would it be like NAMM or MusikMesse where vendors trot out their big upcoming products and try to impress you with their marginally-functional experimental stuff?  Would it be a big tradeshow?  Would it be a lot of beardy guys standing around arguing about tube manufacturers?

It turned out to be a none of those things.  Oh, sure, there was a tradeshow aspect of it, and that was alright.  Vendors were there in spades, but they were pretty much only showing off what they had, not their upcoming stuff.  The sales staff was not pushy at all, and was more than accomodating to questions.  The only really esoteric flamewar I saw was a brief bit of the Manley reps casting aspersions on solid-state gear by tossing off some facts about linear harmonic distortion.

Read more

Everybody in the world now knows that Michael Jackson has died.

Some people respond with fawning praise, some with tasteless jokes, others with wailing agony, and others respond by shopping.

I dunno. Whatever you thought of his music or his person, he was an inescapable part of the childhood of really anyone in their 30′s – the guy racked up so many hits in the 80′s and was so omnipresent on MTV and the radio it was hard not to be exposed to him over and over again. The guy was a megastar by 1980, and a downright cultural phenomenon by 1985. He was also stunningly talented – a gifted singer and songwriter, a groundbreaking dancer, and was visionary enough to see the possibility of the music video in an era when most videos were just “pretty haircuts on a soundstage.” Thriller was a rare recording that managed to bridge many markets at once, incredibly successfully – it was funky enough for urban markets, comfortable enough for the conservative suburbs, and featured guest spots by both veteran Paul McCartney and (relatively) newly-minted rock royalty Eddie Van Halen.   Much like every home in the 70′s seemed to have a copy of Frampton Comes Alive , seemingly every home in the 80′s had Thriller on vinyl or cassette.

Everyone my age has a Jackson story.  I remember riding the bus to school, singing “Beat it” and “Thriller” at the top of my lungs with the other kids.  I remember a nebbishy kid in my 5th-grade class trying to win popularity with his screener copy of the long-form Thriller video.  I remember painstakingly trying to recreate the Thriller cover art on a cassette J-card for my tape dub of my neighbor’s record.  I remember the only good thing about Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” being Jackson’s cameo.  I remember seeing those 4 steps of the moonwalk with my jaw hanging agape, and then spending the next week trying to duplicate it in my stocking feet on the kitchen linoleum (and failing repeatedly).

The guy was a Performer with a capital P.

But the guy was human.  Really, really human.  I suppose that having a weird childhood before you became and international pop star at the age 11 is going to warp you a bit.  Add the aforementioned stardom before puberty, a near-un-toppable feat in the entertainment industry when he’s barely in his twenties…there’s nowhere to go but weird and down.  His odd manchild antics, his truly bizzarre alleged  personal life, his slow transformation from an babyfaced kid to what Robin Williams described as “a photo-negative Katherine Hepburn”, his sad and desperate self-appointment of “King of Pop,” his even sadder attempt at creating a family life, the decline of his music into irrelevance and near self-parody – a guy at the top has a long way to fall, and he was about as high as anyone ever got.

The sideshow is over for him now, mostly.  I’m sure there will be wrangling and conspiracy theories for years to come, but I doubt we’ll see the kind of “he’s really still alive!” hysteria that followed the death of Elvis – that the oddest man in pop music died a strange and unexpected death somehow seems even more plausible than the death of the drug-addicted, deep-fried Presley.    There were always glimmers of a comeback, just as there had been for that other King, but the never really congealed, emerging ill-formed and half-baked.  Now, there won’t be a comeback, but he can’t really sink much further into weirdness.

It’s been a long, very strange trip.  Pop culture will probably not see the like again.