Month: April 2008

rreplay ventured into the public ear for the first time this past Sunday evening, hauling our gear down to Ong King‘s open mike. In case you don’t know about it, Ong King is as combo gallery/multimedia/music/event space, probably the coolest place in town. We played a short set after a smoking jam from Quadraphonix, Drummer/percussionist/vocalist Shazam, and awesome ukulele player Taimane Gardener. Jonathan Heraux, Quadraphonix’ (awesome) drummer, owner of Ong King, and mc for the open mic commented “that’s a lot of wires” once we were set up. He also said that when he got the cd he popped it on in his car, and by the time he reached his destination, he was on the phone to us to see if we would come down for open mike as a sort of proof of concept…I guess a few other times laptop oriented bands would come for gigs and not be able to get the software running, so he wanted to see if we could do what we do live. We could, cuz basically everything we’ve recorded is live, just minus the audience…no overdubs or post-processing other some “mastering polish.” We did our thing, it seemed well received. It sounded like us but louder than usual, going through their PA, people clapped, it was fun. Taimane Gardener then followed with an awesome set showing a voice to match the uke chops. Good company we got to keep!

Hopefully it will lead to some gigs before I leave for India and Eric has to go back to Boston. Gotta book this incarnation before mid-May, if anyone is interested. The leader of a dance troupe heard one of the pieces and is planning on choreographing a performance to it…either “amazonia dub” or “pilaf,” not sure which….hmmm maybe they’d do something with us live? Have to find out who it is first though. We were so busy setting up I didn’t get a chance to exchange numbers. I forgot to press the record button on my computer, so don’t have a digital recording of the event, but Eric got it on his mini recorder, so if that came out, we’ll post it later this week.

One more tune from the mess . . . actually let’s see, more like eight…see if you can name them all. This has one of my favorite “wall of squall” moments in it, where for about fifteen seconds we ran everything on eleven and a half before returning to your regularly scheduled programming.

As always, If you were around when the mess was playing, drop me a line either from the way.net contact page, or to rath [at] way [dot] net or leave a comment. If you do the latter, I have no other way of responding than commenting back, so you might want to subscribe to the rss feed (over in the right column).

The 3/24 and 3/31 rreplay sessions are now in the rrepository. From 2/24, I really like “sizzle” and “summer shirt” — see if you can figure out the pun in the title of the latter one from the music. From 3/31, I like “basspace” — that’s all Eric’s bass other than the drums. No guitar until the bat sonar near the end. This came out of a mis-connection in the program that was sending Eric’s bass through all the guitar effects by accident. Once we figured out what was happening and fixed it, we went back and did it on purpose, with Eric playing and me knob twiddling the drums and bass. “Sand garden” is an introspective piece that gets chopped up and reconstituted at the end. “Pali night ride” is another moody piece that I like. We’ll probably eventually fade it out after the first few minutes of guitar cuz while the keyboard textures that follow are interesting, I think the guitar section captures a better feel.

• rreplay home page, including our first album, rrepertoire, which you can listen to and download free.