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I’m excited to announce that this year I’ll be making a return to live music, and more to the point: I’ll be playing my own music live. The last time I played my own music live it was 2005 and it was a less than enjoyable experience due to being scantly prepared technologically speaking, as well as being grossly under-rehearsed and under-trained to do all the vocals. I remember it being emotionally excruciating in front of 30 odd people just dying through songs like I Can And I Can Not, which are songs not only technically tricky, but quite naked about my inner feelings and doubts (especially at the time). Despite encouragement after the gig, I really let the live idea die a quiet death and never felt bold enough since to revive the corpse. Until now…

Recent success with recording vocals I’m happy with alongside daily training with vocal stamina and technique has given me the confidence to at least attempt to perform my own songs in front of other people. I know the more I sing and the more I rehearse my songs with the correct technique, the better chance I’ve got of pulling off the performance live, in one take so to speak. I’ve also now got the means technically to do some solo live work: Later this week I’m getting an Apple Mac Book Pro 13″ laptop specifically for this task of playing live, as well as a Presonus Firebox so I can plug in my guitar and run all the guitar sounds via audio plugins playing along to a rendered backing track. I think I’ll process the vocals the same way, but I’m not quite sure of the details yet. I looked into using Ableton Live to host all this, but I found it to be overkill for what I’m attempting to do. So, instead I’m using Reaper, which allows me to do bpm sync and automation on effect parameters for song patches. I guess as I rehearse the songs the sounds will evolve over time.

I went through all my songs and decided which one I could adapt for live performance. A little surprisingly, I’ve come up with 30 songs I can choose from! These may or may not include the following:

Our Blood Is Black
Vegemite
Iced Coffee 2
Stormformer
First Impressions Always Count
Crawling Up That Hill
The Cold
Codec
404 Not Found
No Phone Calls
I Can And I Can Not
The Infant Wish
Berarngutta
I Like You
Add As Friend
Little One
Wattle Bloom
A Forest
Vulcanella Self Destruct
The 4th
Backdropped
Saint Santa
Phoebe
The Objector
Summertime Quiet
Long
Meteor Shower
I Love You And I Love Your Needles
Sleep Is God
Party Line

You may notice that this range of tunes includes some titles that haven’t even been released yet! I’ll be using the experience to ‘road test’ some of these near-finished tunes and will probably help me decide how I want to record them for the final studio versions. I’m also happy that there’s some older tracks in the list like Sleep Is God and I Love You And I Love Your Needles – I’ve already had some fun remixing these older songs to give them a fresh and up to date sound – hopefully I’ll perform them better than ever. Having this many tunes to pick from will be handy in keeping set lists fresh and to play whatever suits my mood.

No dates locked in just yet, but I’ll post here as soon as something is arranged. I’ll probably be playing a few nights at the Armidale Club to get some runs on the board. I’m looking forward to learning from the experience, and getting better because of it. I’m aiming to have some momentum going by next year and may attempt to play some dates up at Brisbane.

Last Friday the 13th Iain and I played at Uralla’s Top Pub for the Get Off Your Arts Dance Party, in support for Tijuana Cartel and playing after The Knobs. At the peak there must have been over 50 people there. It’s hard to focus back to this event as already my mind is deliberately erasing the memory of it. Some things went really well – we got to set up early and make sure all everything was running perfectly for the PA; and some moments during the performance had a nice spark to it. But the usual drawbacks and mad surprises were present: no payment for playing; no certainty with food arrangements; stunned unresponsive audience; storm water leaking heavily onto the playing area threatening electrocution and causing flooding of the floor during Ed and James’ set; bumping and damaging equipment; and of course people getting roped into running the PA when there should have been someone formally taking that role all along. I found it very hard to get into the performance, and only felt the magic once during “Life This Free”. But otherwise I just couldn’t keep up with Iain and where he was going, nor did I feel emotionally committed to the whole operation. Earlier in the evening I had a mild panic attack from feeling claustraphobia and noisy indecision inside the pub and had to run outside just to breathe. To tell you the truth I probably would have been happier at home in bed with a Stephen Donaldson book!

I’m feeling a little burnt our from a few things, playing live and rehearsing is part of that. I feel I need to “heal”. Perhaps a break is in order, but I’m not sure. There are other things to organise first:

Late last week R and I received notice from the rental agents that our landlord wished to move back into the Galloway Street residence where we are living. We have been given 6 weeks. This news came as a bit of an emotional blow at first, but I’ve since taken it on the chin and starting to figure out the daunting puzzle of how to pack up everything. This means we’ll have to find a new rental, at least for a short time like 6-12 moths, while we plan and initiate building our OWN house somewhere else in Armidale. It’s all a little bit of a case of bad timing. This means I will have to put any studio production work on hold at least for the next month or so while we move, and who knows if the new rental we have to settle with will have an acoustic space I can use for work. I’ll update you all of what will happen here, if I can: my internet access may be little more restricted for a while. Maybe that’s a good thing.

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.

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…