Pleuting is underway in Chapel Hill. The Happy Gigster Portable Noise Cancellators were given more opportunities for quality control at the Caribou Creche. Now, back to pack and e-flurry.
Chapel Hill and Carrboro are both new to me, I liked what I saw and would like to come back. Hopefully, The Agency will receive an invitation for our return.
Lobby call at 10.30, to follow an e-flurry.
15.20 Hotel Acceptable, Charlotte, NC.
Front View…
Front & Down…
View left…
View right…
An acceptable hotel room, but high speed connection @ $9.95 – no! This is now a service that should be complementary! says the petulant Gigster. However, money is paid and e-flurrying done for now.
Workstation…
On the journey here: two cellphone conversations with pals in Seattle. Bill Rieflin called to discuss Slow Music on the West Coast this May. Then, a brief conversation with Jeff Fayman in a Seattle orchestral session for Immediate Music, to provide music for the trailer to Spiderman III.
Lobby call for 17.00.
23.23 This evening’s performance venue: the Neighbourhood Theatre, Charlotte.
Biff Prepares The Slideshow…
The House…
… with Four Quarters’ Maintainers at the back, Danielle and Robert, innocents thrown into the fiery pit of live performance.
The Stage…
The Venue…
The Street…
… and poor, unsuspecting punters whose hard-earned pay has been prised from their grasp by weasely marketing maneouvres.
Back onstage, Slideshow…
… of the current King Crimson.
The quad sound took some balancing in the house, to fine-tune the musical intent of the player; and some refinement of Solar Voyager programmes.
Of the performance: overall, a generous audience. No idea what it was like.
Following the Q&A, as I was about to begin playing the final musical section, a young man came to the front of the stage and asked me if I had ever used Guitar Rig. This behaviour I found astonishing and, if I have to explain why, the reader’s response astonishes me as well. Well, all right, then!
Q: How to pin to earth an aspiration to the stars?
A: Ask a mundane stuff question right at the beginning of take-off, when the player is most vulnerable to inappropriate behaviour such as witless questions.
Another questioner at the same time: So you’re not going to play any tunes? Quick on the uptake, this one.
As we were leaving the theatre, several people offered kind words, other than one character: I’ve never felt so ripped off in my life! It’s only quarter to ten and you talked for half of that. Long and cruel experience has suggested that there is little value in reasoned dialogue with someone locked in reactive anger; although that is also an approach I have used. Tonight, I might have pointed out that very few people can take Soundscapes for thirty minutes, even fewer for forty-five, so at just over an hour of bleeping and droning, better to be kind to the audience and leave it at that. But instead I said nothing to him, continuing instead a conversation with a pal that the he was interrupting and overlaying with his consumerist complaint.
Back to the hotel, Night Sky I…
Night Sky II…
Biff’s pix of the evening (courtesy of Befftone.com)…
I...
II...
III...
"Some things protect themselves by being what they are."
