mmd

Let’s start with some ghostly images thanks to R:

All in all a good performance! Possibly out best so far, but still a long way from perfect. Iain reported recieving many positive comments after the show. I didn’t stick around to find out, as I was pretty over it and needed the peace and quite of home. Why so? Let’s tell the story:

R and I were set to go up from Armidale to Wytaliba with our car load of music equipement and camping gear at 3pm, aiming to arrive at the venue two hours later. A mere 17kms out of town my car decides produce an alaming little explosion and strange sounds causing us to pull over. Deciding that car was un-drivable we hitched back to town, got in R’s car and drove back out to my car with some oil and to better inspect what had happened. It turns out the radiator had exploded! A visible crack had allowed all the liquid inside to fizz out everywhere rendering the car’s cooling system defunct (and who knows what else just at this moment). Realising we couldn’t get my car back to town we headed home and started to call the local road-side assistance organisation to book in some towing. Fortunately, a very friendly Simon from the NRMA was nearby and I was off on the highway again with him to get my car. Despite the cracked radiator the car would still run ok, just enough life in it to drive it up onto the tow truck. Simon nicely droped the car off at the mechanic and everything was squared off. R and I had a quick bite to each, made sure we had everything pack in her car, and headed up the highway, again, at 7pm.

We bumped our way into Wytaliba after 9pm, to hear the party going at the shop and Bruce’s punk-metal act Suspected Terrorists brutalising some aggression into the air. The vibe certainly didn’t seem that welcoming, and we had a little trouble finding Iain amongst the bleary eyed roamers and drunk people arguing about something. R found Iain grooving out to the music and despite us being 4 hours late it was ok to still play live set after Bruce (whew!).

The highlight of the set was our new version of Massive Attack’s ‘Angel’ which we’ve morphed into a much more dancy version. We had a good handful of people get up and groove out to that, and thus Iain did a good job of extending it out to take them on a longer ride. It was strange though, I felt we played even better the song after with our own work ‘Life This Free’ but having hardly anyone dancing for it – I guess people love being rewarded with something they know. The vibe wasn’t quite there with the party, some 50 odd people milling about, a lot of passive observation and quite a few moments of aggression or imposing manipulatively behaviour. There were two notable moments of this. One was a younger fellow decided that he needed to join us on the drum kit, play out of time and generally ignore the feel of what we were doing (even though he was happy enough about doing all this). The other moment was between songs toward the end of our set where an old bloke came up to me and started gibbering something I could understand fully, something about how I don’t need all this technology I’m using and that I’m a crap guitarist. He then proceeded to give me the finger! I guess you can’t please everyone! Who knows what that was all about…

Fittingly, the power generator ran out of petrol just as we finished our last song.

Iain, on behalf of Zia, had offered us to stay on and sleep over, upgrading from camping to sleeping in a room. But we’d both had enough by that point. Feeling pretty pumped from playing and realising that it was only 10:30pm we decided to make a run for home, to peace and quiet and neglected pets waiting… In bed by 1:30am. What a gig adventure!

Ghost Inputs on YouTube

The above video is a 10 minute ‘highlights edit’ done by Iain. If anything it gives you a taste of the style we are working on.

Ghost Inputs are set to play live this Saturday the 22nd at Wytallibar, and with any luck we’ll have some media for you.

Download the new song: Vegemite

A little while back I saw that Mick Rippon was doing a ‘rainy day’ song, mostly out of fun because it happened to be rainy at the time. The song had a little bit of a throw-away quality to it with its standard sad pop chords and middle-of-the-road plod, but it really caught my ear for some reason. It struck me as a nice container for something emotionally rich and with a bit of work it could be turned into a bitter-sweet experience. I suggested to Mick that I quickly lay down a guitar solo for it and see what happens. He said go for it.

I wanted to work as quickly as possible to take a break from my usual approach of agonizing over songs for months and months – just work hard and get something good happening. It wasn’t long into working on this that a vocal melody popped into my head and within a few takes I had that down as well as a sustained guitar solo. Mick added some extra interesting chord changes and fx,  afterwhich I set to polishing the mix and master – the result it what you hear now. A little rainy day piece to enjoy with your comfort food of choice!

There’s no doubt Mick and I have a good musical communication going on when we need to have it, probably due to some shared computer software herritage and perspectives on song construction. There is a desire to work on more collaborations with him but there’s much to finish first before we dive into that. Some big projects to be released first, some due very soon!

Suva has quite kindly featured my music in his second episode of Remixta. The featured track is Long off my album 3 Smargaid Maerd, which is also featured as a complete work. For those of you who don’t know yet Remixta is a podcast of Renoise artist’s work, both of which have been high quality. This episode has a chill-out theme, and features stuff by Mick Rippon and Xerxes.

The Ghost Inputs Halloween Gig for 2008 has been and gone! Overall, I felt it was a little hit and miss due to a smallish attendance, most folk waiting politely for the punk band after us, Suspected Terrorists. We did, however, achieve some songs with higher ambitions and complexities, so this will give us confidence to really ramp it up with future gigs with a better vibe. Vibe is everything playing live. You really pick up on the subtleties in the room, the intentions and tensions – and it ends up affecting the music.

Mum was visiting for the event, and managed to snap a few bits of evidence:

We’ve another gig on very soon at the Armidale Club, on the 6th which is this Thursday night. in support of TuneFM’s birthday bash (I think), and this time we’ll be on late. After that we’ll have some time to develop ideas for the 22nd of November, at Wytallibar.

Thanks to R, Alex Z, and Mum for coming along to support. Special thanks to Simon for being a front of house engineer for the evening, the sonics were excellent. We were filmed too, so I’ll let you know if a youtube video surfaces…