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Waking up this morning, I feel like I can retire from music and feel complete. Last night I played a completely improvised set with my band ‘Beast, Please Be Still’ as part of the Cumulus Festival (three days of various forms of post rock). I was a little nervous about going out there and I am sure there were a lot of people who didn’t know what to make of it, but I had absolutely amazing time just letting the joyful noise take over me. At one point I started singing the words from “Celebration” at another point I let this strange gutteral ‘hahahahahaha!’s take over and I literally felt like I was speaking in tongues.

So it’s good to know that someone out there enjoyed the experience, and in fact, I think they nailed the sound and experience we were shooting for. Check out this music review, it has to be one of the best one’s I’ve ever received:

Beast, Please Be Still
Remember when Igor Stravinsky wrote “Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring)” and then it got played live and people rioted? Well, there were no riots tonight (hey, we have a new president, everything is great!), but the performance of BPBS was basically just as envelope-pushing as that magnificent piece of work (not the ballet part, apparently that sucked. just the music.). The five gentlemen (plus two guest musicians) in BPBS played guitar, violin, bass, drums, yelling, baritone sax, soprano sax, electric melodica-looking thing (electric sax???), trombone, maybe a baritone horn and some weird percussion like a hunk of metal bashed on with a metal rod wrapped with fifteen rolls of electrical tape (give or take 14 rolls). The whole time they were playing, my forehead was all scrunched up. Just like Le Sacre du Printemps, you wonder if they are just tuning up and testing out their instruments or if these are actual songs. I didn’t even recognize when they started playing. Their music is some sort of tribal chaos with tendencies toward funk and avant jazz. How do they remember how the songs go? How do these songs make sense? The saxophone player had a wonderful jumpsuit on. If they all had the same outfit, they would make the perfect replacement for the Star Wars Cantina Band. So ahead of it’s time that it might have come from the future. In the chaos, the drummer was slapping his drums with his hands, the violinist shredded half of his bow up, and the whole place felt confused. This is what I expected from the Cumulus Festival! Awesome!

Here’s some audio from last night, recorded by Tiffany on www.hollowearthradio.com

1st Movement
2nd Movement
3rd Movement

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Open Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.