The morning after. We played College Perk last night, and I hadn’t looked forward to anything quite like I’d been looking forward to this gig in quite a while. We played with Dan Zimmerman – which is always fun, we played at the College Perk – which is always fun, we played some old tunes that we haven’t played in forever (bRIDGE and Spine among others) – which is always refreshing, and a new cover (Toxic by Britney Spears) – to keep out cultural awareness honed.
We also tried a bizarre set-up which, although I don’t regret it… and it was also a lot of fun and all… I don’t think I’d do it again.
So, I’m not quite sure who forwarded the idea… I think someone blamed it on Sharif, but I know I really encouraged it by mentioning that I’d tried it before at the Rabbit – but somewhere while waiting around for Dan and Heather to get to the Perk, Brennan and Sharif and I got it into our heads that it would be a good idea to set up in the round… but in reverse.
So we wired three PAs and a guitar amp together, grabbed a corner for each of us, put all the couches in the centre of the main room facing outwards, and set ourselves up surrounding the audience. Which meant that we were really mobile, and could face one another, which I really liked, but it meant that actual sound balance was sort of Hellish to control, and that Brennan, acting as soundSlave for the night, got a lot of excercise running from one corner of the room to the other. In extreme cases, we were leaping over people and climbing over couches to get from one corner of the room to the next. Yessss … chaos.