Archive for January 2008
Another day, another gig and so second gig of the year was on 4th January: Buck 65 at GoMA - Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art - as part of their Andy Warhol Up Late season.
It’s a great concept; $20 for the Warhol exhibition and the gig and get to avoid all the kids who are at the exhibition during the day time. Also it finishes at 9:30pm so you’ve still got time to head back to the Valley for more music. Bit of a strange venue with it being cavernous and somewhat sterile compared to the normal spit and sawdust joint you’d probably go and see small gigs at but it worked well for Buck 65, possibly as it was just him, laptop and possibly some decks (couldn’t see probably so not sure if the scratching was vinyl or electonic. Not sure how it will sound with a full band with drums though. There’s some good stuff coming up there though in the coming weeks including New Buffalo, Ed Kuepper, Caribou, and Trans Am so I think I’ll be back there at some point.
Having berated Girl Talk a bit in the last blog for being one man and his laptop, although it was the same for Buck 65 you got more of a human element from his rapping and inter-song chat than with a laptop-based DJ. Not really a huge hip hop fan but again it was a recommendation from someone and I liked the stuff that is up on his myspace site.
Lighting was pretty good if a bit all over the place, which is why some of the photos are a bit blown out on one side of his face. If you went to the side of the stage you could get his relection in the glass and got a couple of nice shots from there. As it was only one guy didn’t take that many shots so some here and a few more on flickr.
Back to Brisbane after New Year in Sydney and straight back into it with the first gig of the year on the 3rd Januray: Girl Talk at The Zoo.
Came from a recomendation from someone I know who is into his dance music. Call me old fashioned but I still don’t really get the whole thing about one guy and a laptop. Sure, it’s clever in the first instance, creating a load of music that relies on different samples from some well known and some less well know songs but it gets lost in translation to a live show when it’s a guy pressing keys on his laptop keyboard. Also, with him playing so many mainstream loops it almost became like one of those really dire megamix 7″ singles - am trying to repress memories of a Beatles one and an Abba one that I have heard in the past….
I think the Zoo people were freaking out with all the people on stage which was far enough when the people on the drum riser on the stage started crowd surfing. It’s a long way to the ground when you’re an additional 6ft above the stage…
Was hard to photograph with half the audience on stage. I felt a bit sorry for him as a couple of people on stage seemed to spend half the gig with their camera phones about 6″ from his face. Having said that in retrospect I probably should have joined in the dash for the stage before security stopped letting people get up and done the same…
Took some photos from the step up to the mixing desk but you couldn’t really see the laptop he was using very well above the heads of the people at the front. Also tried to get some shots where he was lit up by his laptop screen; the trouble with this is that it’s not very bright, meaning a low shutter speed and you have to wait until he moves his face close into the screen and stays still.
Some photos here and a few more on flickr.
Managed to finish going through some of the backlog of photos over Xmas, starting with the Saturday of the Butcher Birds in Melbourne back in September. Not much happened on the Saturday - a day of relaxing after having gotten up at 4:30am the day before to get the plane down, running around Melbourne all day, playing as PBS live show and the 2am slot at The Pony. So everyone went off, did their own thing before regrouping back at the hotel before heading off to The Tote for soundcheck at about tea time.
Went to some dodgy Greek restaurant for tea where they freaked us out by just bringing piles of food out to us without anyone having actually ordered anything and without them telling us how much it was costing, but it was all ok in the end.
Then it was back to The Tote and having to endure a freezing cold Melbourne beer garden at the start of September with the ten-legged cigarette smoking machine that is Butcher Birds…
Ouch My Face were the main support.
Some photos here and more on flickr.
Ouch My Face
Butcher Birds
