2 posts tagged “san francisco”

The Imogen Heap concert was fantastic! She's really someone awesome to
watch live! Live looping, the performance, she's funny and quirky and
dances about the stage and says funny things and really loves the
audience, her live versions soudn very different from the studio
versions, she's a very good piano player and a very good singer
(obviously, but it's more apparent live)... We saw all the songs Kid
Beyond did at the STarry Plough as I told you, except a new trance one which I didn't like that much. I think I like
listening to Kid Beyond's beatboxing a lot (it's totally incredible)
but not his songs that much. They get old fast. Which is sad, I want
to like it, but I don't really, it's just too much noise and sometimes
there are very slight tuning issues when he harmonizes with himself
because it's all live. And I don't really like the melodies he chooses
for his songs. However, Imogen Heap's usage of live looping is totally
different and vastly superior, even for her songs that are just like
Kid Beyond's only in that she uses just her voice and no other
instruments (there was only one song like that, where she only used
her voice and a live-looper. There was one other song where she uses
only her voice and a vocoder: Hide and Seek, of course.) I want a
vocoder so bad. It looks like SO MUCH FUN to fuck around with. And a
piano! Imogen Heap has such a cool voice. I feel sort of like I never
want to sing again, because my voice is so bland and uninteresting and
offkey and whiny and nasally but yet I have dreams of it being good,
so I feel like it can never be as good as I wish it was. Haha. I also
feel so uncreative, like there's nothing in me. I told you I would
write you a song, but I don't know how! And some songs are so
incredibly simple, 3 chords, a simple melody, but they're so
effective. How do they do it? I guess I must study songs, learn to
play them, learn what chord progressions work, learn more chords to
begin with... I think I do have a skill, and that's harmonizing. I'm
very very good at harmonizing, if given a melody. I just suck at the
melody part, or coming up with anything original. Anyway, blah blah
blah. For some songs it was just her onstage, and she'd go back and
forth between all this equipment--her "parrot" as she called her
live-looping machine-thing, and like four midi keyboards (one was a
red keytar), and one electric keyboard attached to a clear
piano-shaped box lined with lights (fantastic!!!!), and an instrument
that I don't know. I really have no idea what it was. Alex says it was
a "thumb piano" and it's wires. ???? She'd play a bit on that, then
start a pre-recorded sequence using a midi keyboard, and sing, and
then harmonize with herself, and then play the piano. For some songs
she had varying numbers of people on stage. There was one really
extremely dorky guy who played a midi sequencer, the double bass, and
the french horn. There was one percussionist who played a xylophone, a
ridiculously tiny drum "kit" ... no really, it was tiny, each "drum"
and "cymbal" was smaller than your palm. I'm serious. I thought it
MUST have been electronic drum pads or something, but Alex says
they're really acoustic, just incredibly small, and miked really well.
That thing was cool. And they clearly had differnt pitches too. Anyway
he also played a regular drumkit. Then sometimes the first guy who
opened (who I missed mostly. I only caught part of his last song. I
was late to teh warfield, sad) came out and played electric guitar.
And sometimes Kid Beyond came out and sang a harmony or beatboxed.
That was pretty darn cool. Actually it was straight-up fantastic.

She played "Let Go" totally acoustically, on the piano, and the dude
played the double bass along with her. It was so beautiful. Gosh,
that's such a good song.

I had good seats. The standing seats were sold out by the time I got
my act together to buy tickets, but I got tickets that were in the
center, in the second row of the upper (seated) level. So that was
fun. And I'm glad that I wasn't standing, because I'd have gotten
tired, and since I was on the upper level I could see everything
better. The drawback of course is that it's harder to dance. =)

I love Elanor's cat. My respiratory system does not. I pet him anyway. My allergies aren't terrible--more general congestion and slight malaise than inability to breathe and wanting to die, so it's all right. He gets really disconcerted if you look him in the eyes for more than a second: he makes a sudden startled "mwrah!" sound and looks down, chin to chest, while drawing himself up and back.

I followed Derek and Theresa to sf last night to watch them perform at Mr. Smith's. Outside the bar/club were two men in pretty makeup twirling lit-up balls around on strings, apparently all night. Inside, Theatre Rice did improv along the bar (we got there at the end. All I caught were references to squeezing puppies to death), then Kamikaze Theory did some comedy sketches in the basement (Theatre Rice : Kamikaze Theory :: DeCadence : Spot the Octopus) that went for shock value before humor. A family dinner with talk of the woman's right to choose what to do with the bun (or not-yet-bun?) in her oven; a thai sex slave entrapment scheme; jellyfish (which was really a flying spaghetti monster) and urine on the face and anal sex without lube; a catholic priest coming in a boy's eye (I don't know what he squirted out of his pants. Probably lotion) while girls mimed having sex to "like a prayer." Someone spilled an entire drink down my back (I was kneeling so people behind could see)--just another injury to my favorite black sweater-jacket (it's developing a hole-run on the left sleeve). Taking it in to get dry-cleaned and fixed will probably cost more than it did ($15 in santa monica during a decadence spring tour at some store that was going out of business that we sang in front of. I bought it because the weather was unexpectedly cold.) The venue failed to proved two microphones for Magnetic North so they switched off on it, which worked out better than I'd hoped. The girl next to me said "looks like the DJ's feelin' it!"--he scratched along to "Drift Away" and cut the sound for the callbacks. Afterwards I wasn't feeling like this shit was bananas, so after putting D's free drink ticket to good use (T told me to get a vodka tonic so I did) I went upstairs, where a guy and a girl clad in almost nothing but their body paint gyrated on the bar. That was pretty mesmerizing for a while. Basically I was really confused by the event.

My brain is telling me to halt my current activity, which is chewing off the (puny) callous on the tip of my middle left finger, for I need it. Here's another small child that can play Hysteria perfectly (though she picks it in that take), except this time she's 15, an asian girl, and can play many instruments. She is my hero. I'm keeping her rendition of Exo-politics to study.