maQLu

Been thinking for a while about what to do about stage lighting – sure, some venues have their own rigs, others just flood the stage with white light and that’s that. And others are not specifically music venues so the lighting is more a matter of overhead flourescents, always flattering.

I was envisioning something a little darker and moodier, and decided to pop by Long & McQuade to see what I could see.

Found a couple small LED stage lights for fairly cheap that will do nicely to mostly have me in the dark with creepy color washes. Best of all, they both have programs to change color to match the noise I’m making. Test drove this feature by doing a quick run through of a new song, “Counterfeit” and it worked perfectly, albeit with some extra color changes thrown in courtesy of my neighbor’s drum solo practise.

Will be debuting these on April 6th when I play the VanMusic.ca Presents the Vancouver Indie Pop Series, it’s at the British Ex-Serviceman’s Association, 1143 Kingsway in Vancouver.

Should probably start some sort of pic of the day thing, all terribly blurry cell phone camera shots of dumb shit I see or make.

I won’t commit to that yet, but here’s one:

Ken doesn’t seem to mind the high-heeled boot to the nuts too much. Or he’s too distracted by looking up her skirt to notice. Either way I think he reminds me of someone I know quite well.

Anyway, progress on new material is being made, courtesy of forgotten work from June resurfacing. It’s like a time travel gift from my own past – I found something scrawled in my notebook about structure on a song called “Voodoo Doll.” I recall having that as a title but have no memory of doing anything about it, but figured if I wrote about the structure there might well be something on my hard drive and sure enough, I had the drums all done. Sounds like a pretty solid foundation to build off of.

And then I noticed in the same spot on my hard drive a session called “Precursor” which I also don’t remember working on, only having the title in my idea file. Turns out I had 95% of a cool little noise interlude built, and I finished the other 5% in less than an hour tonight. Might well make the album cut, and if it does, it might well be the album opener.

Not a bad haul from wherever the Hell my head was in mid-June.

Well, enough rambling. I’ll leave the dolls to their little game of Kick Ball[s] and I’ll get back to working on “Voodoo Doll.”