mmd

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.

Ghost Inputs (Iain MacKay and myself live) will be playing at the Get Off Your Arts Black Friday Dance Party, which is this coming Friday. We have a few more practices to go to make sure we’re playing up to the same level of energy we had last year. This is straight off the back of a ‘warm up gig’ we did last Friday at a private party in Armidale…

With every gig I come away thinking “now I’ve seen it all” but I keep getting surprised with new random insanities. This last gig hosted all the usual madness of having no run-order, no sound check, and random people everywhere on all sorts of substances. But the cheery on top was undeniably the stage set-up: “erected” in a back yard on uneven ground causing the whole thing to slope forward in differing degrees. To add to the odd situation there was a tarp above the stage which was so low that when you stood up your head disappeared up into it, meaning that the audience couldn’t see who you were! The combination of a sloping stage and the low hanging tarp meant that I had to stoop over to play, which ended up making my back a bit sore. The whole PA and lighting was run off just one power point and there were weird glitches and blips causing the whole thing to feel like it was going to fall over at any second. Iain had no power to his laptop so that decided to make a problem of itself mid set – nothing like a recalcitrant computer to make you feel helpless on stage. Despite all the above we had some ok moments where things came together. I couldn’t help but feel a little numb to everything, perhaps out of self preservation. Yet again I’m scratching my head thinking is it worth it at all, but I have hopes that the gig we have next Friday will be a little better. I’m kinda missing time to work on my own albums…

I’ve been running on empty a little bit lately, hence not much posting here.

Hunz’s RPM Challenge mixing was a lot of time consuming work but also a lot of fun: it’s now all finished and shall be released soon! The album is called “Thoughts That Move”. I will let everyone know when it goes public – you have a good one to look forward to!

Other than that, work has been insanely busy and time consuming due to the teaching semester starting (meaning I’m running around again recording all these lectures). To top it all off R and I have been doing a lot of ‘house hunting’ and ‘property hunting’ in the last couple of weeks. That can be enough to totally do your head in with all the options and possibilities. At this point we’re leaning toward buying land and getting something build for us (not by us), possibly using new green technology and ideas. And of course, we must include somehow a new space for my studio! I’d miss the old roomy acoustics at Galloway Street, but our time here is now limited, and it’s now the moment to commit the ghastly act of conformity and join the property investment game. Part of me feel icky about this, but part of me accepts the inevitability of it all, perhaps looking forward to the quiet modest commitment. I’ll let you know when the decision has been made.

Other parts of me yearn for travel. Sometimes I get cabin fever from being locked in studios all the time, and the cooling crisp air of an approaching autumn beckons me to be on the road. Some new ideas are entering my head either way, but all I have to do is reclaim my time to enact them…

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…

Iain Mackay and I have yet again changed the name of our live duo project from Solsonic to Ghost Inputs. It feels good as a name so far, so we’ll have to see if it sticks. We’re set to play live again at the Armidale Club on October the 31st, a suitably dated event for our new name. Reharsals have been fairly solid so far, and we’re really honing in on ’set ideas’ for songs that allow for refinement rather than plain searching for anything half decent to play. It’s a nice balance between improvisation and highly structured dance beats – you can dance to it but it’s also food for the brain.

So if you happen to be in New England on Halloween do come along to the Armidale Club to see Iain and I do our thing. We’ll try to get some more photos to post here too!