midi in the city debrief etc

well, in the end, all went fairly well at midi in the city last saturday night. firstly, just like now was quite good - jordy lane played a great set - i love his music incredibly, and also turned out to be a great person, i picked him and his girlfriend/collaborator kaity up from redfern in the afternoon and took them home after just like now. the detours played a couple of side project sets which were also great - though cam's stuff undermined a bit by willful amaterism.

steve and i got to midi in the city just after 11. we walked through the courtyard which had some fairly heavy party-techno happening, into the bar room and into a fairly negative vibe as the hiphop crew onstage struggled to overcome flat batteries in two of their three mics and ended up battling away with one mic. the sound, as is often the case with live hiphop, was fairly muddy and muffled. at the end of their set, as the next act set-up, the police arrived on a noise complaint and the organisor got a bit frantic trying to work stuff out. they had to basically turn the outside stuff right down. but as the next inside act started, he said something like here's some drum'n'bass to take us out. steve and i looked at each other and started to worry - surely not two gigs in a row with the rug pulled out beneath us! dane the organisor spent the next 20 minutes or so running around trying to get things sorted, so it wasn't until after that that we could talk to him and get our situation worked out. turns out everything was fine, though things were running a little late. so we set up and started after a (quite good) set of d'n'b at about 10 to 1.

we played fairly well. our set was entirely instrumental, mostly off the laptop but with a couple of tracks incuding steve on guitar. it was good to be able to restart telafonica's live thing in a stripped down manner, in a context that didn't really make that much difference to us. the crowd had thinned by the time we got on. there wasn't really pressure on us at all, which was a nice way to be. due to losing all our old data from the old laptop, and because we went with entirely instrumental tracks, we played a fair amount of things that we've never used before. so there was a handful of tracks based solely on drum loops with a bassline - string a few of those together with some other completed tracks and you have a set!

it was absolutely wonderful playing ableton live off the mac with fast processors and 2 gigs of ram! we had a small string of fx on each send plus strings of fx on 3 individual tracks, plus the midi controller running. in spite of pushing all those things, the cpu usage never went over about 15%, AND THERE WAS NO EARTH HUM!!!!! needless to say, i'm pretty happy with that aspect of things.

the next two gigs are full band things, and there's more in the pipeline for june. now we just have a small problem of steve following dave and cell to london!

setlist:
laughing at trees
89
the more you move the more you stay the same
let's go crazy
maple
berlin
for the manifesto dub
item number
tape noise