This afternoon, Polly Moller and I went down to Los Altos Hills to play in the KFJC pit. KFJC is the radio station at Foothill College, a community college. I took classes there during the summer when I was in high school. And I listened to that radio station when I was a teen, but I’d never been inside of it before.
They lead us down to the “pit” which is a room full of CDs and records with enough space in the middle for a small band to play. I was looking at all of them, since I listened to this station so much when I was a kid. On one wall was tubs full of 7 inch punk records. I saw Bratmobile sort of casually stacked at the edge. These records changed my life! These actual records! Not, like, a different instance but the same pressing, but these actual physical pieces of vinyl opened up my world when I was 16 and then I was in the room with them.
They started calling up sound engineers so that somebody would come over. One finally did, so we did a sound check. There was so much hum and the right channel was out on my headphones. So the sound guy jiggled the headphone cables and I separated the audio cables from the power cables, as they were all snuggling together. Then we improved for about 25 minutes.
I played my “Simple Sample” program. I didn’t know I was going to be playing this ahead of time, so I played the version I had put together for the ETC gig. It has joystick control. It also has a bug in the timing thing that I need to find and squash. Polly played flute and also toys. She read text from a spam message. The text is totally bizarre. I hope she posts it so I can link to it. It has some really disturbing images that come up in it, like with some sort of giant bug, ala Naked Lunch. I sampled her and mostly just played it back, since she wasn’t into the pitch shifting. I added a garbling thing that I originally wrote to mangle Bush, (which I played at ETC along with porn samples.)
I haven’t started officially live coding yet, but I’m at the point where I will confidently modify a program during a sound check. The coming lie detector piece is written to allow live code modification. Because I’m lazy and it’s easier than making buttons and stuff to change states. And that piece is why we were at KFJC. We were there to promote the Edgetone Festival. So after we played, we were interviewed. Well, mostly Polly was interviewed because she is on the board of the festival and because she already knows those guys and finally because I was struck shy by being some place so cool.
Then we packed up and went for food.
The set seemed ok, but Polly was sad because yesterday would have been her 11th anniversary with Paul if he were still alive. It’s the first one she’s marked since he’s gone. She got a tattoo on her back yesterday in honor of him. It’s the Two of Cups, which is a tarot card that had special meaning for them. She spent 3.5 hours having needles pushed into her lower back. It was intense. The tat looks cool, though. It still needs some color work. Her artist is really cool. Seeing that happen really made me want to get another one. A tuba to go with my bass clef? A modular synth front panel? (yes!!) A bike gear and chain? A trans pride symbol? A peace symbol? All of those? (yes!!!)
M ex has a peace symbol around the same spot I would want to put mine. It might be a little weird, but it’s hardly unique for a Berkeley radical to display a peace sign, so I think it would be ok. I’m leaning towards the trans pride symbol, but also wary, in case I want to go stealth or something. Which is stupid, because I’d have to go into hiding or something and give up my career and it would still only out me to people who know this symbol.
Um, anyway, my time is mostly scheduled with practicing for our show on the 23rd. Which you should come to.
Edit
The lyrics are now in the comments for this post.