The Stone concerts, recap

(photos by Sawako)

Sunday’s event at the Stone was lovely. Met some new people and the whole night was eclectic, which I like. Brian Olewnick recaps the concerts on his blog;

http://olewnick.blogspot.com/

Besides being complimentary about my work, his opinion of the night is well articulated. So, thanks for the good notice Brian. Here’s the excerpt which concerns my twenty or so minutes:

There are certain sounds, certain combinations of tone, timbre, pitch, that simply captivate me from the get go. Billy Gomberg’s set on computer and electronics served up an excellent example of this. The tones in question were reminiscent to me of early Terry Riley, say from Poppy Nogood through Shri Camel, with a dash of Jon Hassell and even, toward the end, a soupçon of Roger Powell. (Who’s Roger Powell, you say? Well, he hadn’t crossed my mind in ages but back in ’73 he released a synth album called, um, “Cosmic Furnace” that I thought way cool at the time. Maybe still would, who knows? But some of Gomberg’s intonations here managed to wrest memories of that LP from the depths of my cerebellum). He generated fairly pure tones sliding from one to another via abrupt snaps–I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, but it’s what I associate with analog synths like Riley’s, where shifts in tone are accompanied by sounds I think of as gate openings and closings; I love that sonic sequence and they were all over the place here. It was very vaguely repetitive, no overt rhythms or patterns but one sensed they weren’t far from the surface. He also injected enough sand in the gears to keep things well away from the too-smooth. Really enjoyed it, could’ve sat and listened for a looong time.

My performance was a good representation of my solo improvising setup/practice – Access Virus and live processing. I also used one of The Stone’s guitar amps to really emphasize my textures and warm up the the whole acoustic setting. Very happy about the whole thing.

Please see the rest of Sawako’s pictures here.

Thanks to everyone who made it out on Sunday night.