Hunzspirational
Yet another little trip up to Brisbane over the weekend saw us catch Hunz at The Globe on Friday night. A little tired from traveling all day we found sitting through the support bands a little bit of a challenge – the PA was just way too loud for my fragile ears and the bands were performing music that wasn’t really my sort of thing. It must have been late, possibly quarter to midnight that Hunz with his lappy, mics and keys, plus his bandmates Phil Evans on bass & Richie Young on drums, delivered a shortish set for over 30 minutes.
Playing only songs from the album When Victims Fight the band delivered enhanced versions of the songs with live intensity and genuine emotion, all which came across most enjoyable and beyond expectation. Going off my limited knowledge of their YouTube posted performances, it seems that the band is quite tight and Hunz has embellished the songs with live keyboard, extra melodies and effective ‘tape loop’ style self-sampling of his vocals to perform lovely weaving auto-choruses and builds. There were many moments when I though ‘this is all better than the CD, especially the strength in Hunz’s voice’. It was a slight shame there were only 50+ odd people there to see all this – but I’m reminded of a time I saw Augie March playing beautiful music to a small and totally unresponsive Bistro Audience up at UNE in 2000 before they got very big on Triple J. Somehow, and I know it’s a cliche, I feel it’s the same for Hunz: that wide and appropriately deserving attention will befall this music one way or another. Good gigs leave you with this feeling. There are all too many acts out there that suffer from having too much style and not enough substance – but if you ever catch these guys play live you’ll see that there’s no such issue here. The music left us feeling both entertained as well as inspired.
What a motivator to keep on with my own music.
We met up with him after the set to have a quick chinwag. He told me that the Renoise XRNS files for the new album Thoughts That Move have been released, which you can read more about here. Oh yeah, and of course that means the album has gone fully public and the band will be performing the new songs at future gig dates (lucky for Brisbanites). As stated before, I’m excited for him and think that it’s a good sign of what is yet to emerge.
As for myself at the moment there is little to report other than I’m continuing with much work where I can as time allows. I’ve recently started using Reaper, which is audio software based on much the same philosophy as Renoise. I’m looking at ways I can get the two joined up with ReWire, or using Renoise to do mixes and Reaper to do masters. More soon…
