Guardian of the Non Sequitur

I was listening to NPR’s All Songs Considered and it reminded me of a particular summer and the music that came with it.  In 1986 I was a sophomore in college and took a job at Mo Ranch.  Which is past Hunt, Texas – which you might otherwise think was the last thing on Earth if you were driving off the end.

We had 16 or so summer staff living in one large cabin.  I was working maintenance, groundskeeping, and life guard.  The schedule was: wake up, eat breakfast, labor harder than i ever have (leaving me at 165 lbs.), lunch, half the time: labor in the afternoon, the other half life guard, dinner, kill 6 hours before midnight and bed time.  We had no chaperones or house rules, we were all college kids able to patrol ourselves.  Yes, I could write a whole book about that summer, pre WWW, pre cell phone.  But for now, just the music.

I often spent time in a truck with one of the regular maintenance workers, i forget his name. [Edit: after chatting with a friend from that summer, we've decided: Richard.]  He also often spent time in the evenings at the low water crossings with us.  Almost every night included lots of beer, sometimes with a claw foot bath tub full of ice.  Usually with us hanging out in the water.  (We ran the water moccasins out the first week.)  Infrequently, I and one or two others would end up at his house.  He had a single cassette tape that had two albums on in, depending on mood it was on one side or the other. Continue reading

Despite the fact that I’ve been working across the street from the Continental Club for six months, and now own a store at the same place, I haven’t seen a lot of live music recently.

I’ve been out for Molly & the Ringwalds (work), and for Peter & James and Light Rock Express, which tend to be for socializing. I have seen a few shows, or parts of them, but it seems like it’s been since forever since I’ve gone out specifically to see live music.

Last night there was a three band CD release show at Rudyard’s: I Am Mesmer, Kelly Doyle, and Hillary Sloan.

I’ve seen Hillary many times, but not recently; I’ve been meaning to see Mesmer, and I didn’t know who Kelly Doyle was (until I read the pre-show write-up).

The large number of music related people in the audience told me I had picked the right place to be that night.

I was hanging out with TG who was testing her memory on how many names in attendance she could remember. She got several dozen.

Hillary Sloan started out and her material was very similar to the stuff I was familiar with, her band was good, she seemed perhaps a bit tired and self conscious about her performance, which seemed odd.

Kelly Doyle I recognized for his guitar playing with Clouseaux. He mentioned this was the first time he had fronted a band. Most of the songs were instrumental, with jazz, Eastern European, and pseudo-Asian influences. Odd time signatures were de riguer, but the music was fun and playful.

I Am Mesmer is an amalgamation 7-piece that smashes a lot of styles together. I have a hard time imagining a band like this forming anywhere else (maybe NYC). Two percussionists, banjo leading the band (when not playing the saw), two drastically different styled guitar players that blended well together.

I totally imagined this band filling the SXSW Continental Club Saturday morning slot after Allen Hill. It would be awesome.

Anyway it was nice to have a casual night out, see some friends I hadn’t in a while, and see some great and varied live music.

Radio in Houston has been going downhill for decades.  And when I say radio, I mostly mean music radio.  I still use the radio to listen to news, or the odd Astros game (though I stopped tuning to 740 AM because I would find myself so disgusted by its content on off-sporting hours).

KTRU is the only radio station I will tune in to listen to music anymore.  It hasn’t been a lot of late, but it’s comfortable knowing it’s there.  Student run, student programmed, and with a huge broadcast area, I hope it’s a beacon to non-conformist youth throughout the region.

That will all change soon.  The news of University of Houston purchasing the transmitter from Rice University leaked out last week when UH had to approve the “up to $10M funding” to purchase it.  The actually sale cost has been reported as $9.5M.  You would have thought their would be an announcement or some discussion over on the Rice campus before this happened.  The lack of discussion about the decision is the biggest punch in the gut.

In a day, the Save KTRU site popped up, and today is their first protest.  I saw a lot of student protests at The University of Texas in the late 80′s, but I don’t remember any of them getting what they wanted.  I don’t think this sale will be stopped either. Continue reading

Once again the Houston Press Music Awards Showcase is bringing the best live music value for your buck to a summer Sunday afternoon in downtown Houston.  $10 for 5 hours of music from a variety of ~50 bands.

What’s up with all the capital letters and spaces? I talking to you, B L A C K I E (how do you google that?), dUNETX, D.R.U.M., i N D I G I N I S, and MELOVINE.

Okay, my off-my-lawn moment is over. Time for me to complain about the Houston Press’ inability to make print a grid when they plan a festival style review. I’ve been complaining about that since I was young! (well, i only could find the post from two years ago, but i’ve had that complaint for much longer!)

So, I got off my duff and made it for them again. You can grab it from this google doc. Some special care has been take for distance between venues because I’m still hobbling on a bad ankle with a cane. (Ideas for improvements welcome.)

Random Notes:

The Blaggards have a Google Map of all their concerts.

The Paul Beebe showcase is 6 – 9 at Hard Rock Cafe. Beetle plays every Thursday happy hour at the Continental Club if you want some near-end-week Beatles covers.  Katey Stucky is a great singer.  I caught her last year at the Showcase.

RÖCBAR – (you really should pronounce it rook-bar for being over pretentious) has the curse word showcase capped with a 70s influences rock fusion band (Spain Colored Orange).

Red Cat Jazz Café – they usually have the lighter fare. It’s a nice place to catch a casual show, but very poorly laid out for people coming in and out constantly, which they will be on Sunday.  Me with a cane means I will totally avoid it.

Martell’s – A new name to me, on the north end of Main Street.  With the Tontons and the Blaggards ending things up, it’s sure to be a crowded spot.  Both are great shows.

ISIS – Located in a spot that continues to fail for restaurants and bars on Main @ Prairie.  Ryan Scroggins is an offshoot of the Skarnales clan and I enjoy their Mexi-ska-country groove.  They surprised the locals out at Big Al’s crawfish boil in Trinity and put on a great show.

Flying Saucer – Last year it was a crazy end of the evening scene in there, will see if D.R.U.M. gets the place as cranked up.  Sean Reefer is just one of THE best Country musicians writing country music (instead of Arena Pop with a Hat).  He’s usually on the German Country Charts (which are sizable – those whacky Germans).  Bonus: Texas pints are on sale on Sundays.

House of Blues – There’s been a lot of mutual stroking since this mammoth moved to town.  I have yet to make it to this venue and have heard 5 bad things for each good one.  The inability to keep hydrated without a financial backer is the main complaint I hear.  Hopefully this weekend will give me a chance to change those second hand impressions.  Nick Gaitan’s wonderful melange of music, Umbrella Man will be playing there.  They close this place with Los Skarnales and Sideshow Tramps!  This will be the place to be.  Both of these bands put on extremely high energy shows, and when they’re only given 45 minutes … beware!

Now time to go read about the bands I don’t know to see who I’ll try to introduce myself to this year.

The Houston Press does a lot of work and puts on a great show.  All my complaints are really minor (well, there have been years where some venues were unlistenable – that’s a major problem – but not recently).

Another complaint I have is: what does it cost to get a beer in this place?!

Some places have $2 Lone Star or $3 (uhg) Bud Light.  But some venues (hey, speaking of that, what happened to The Venue?) have only liquor drinks, $6.50 crap beer, and $5 8 oz. Coke.  One of the deals of “We’re gonna bring you a crowd on Sunday of new people who aren’t familiar with your place” should be you have to have one cheap beer available for the patrons, and if you sell out of $3 MGD by 5:45, you have to sell some of your precious Dos Equis, et. al for cheap.  Houston Press, force it!

BoingBoing had a really interesting two part conversation between Xeni Jardin and Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music and Matt Ganucheau of Expression College about generative music.

There was a question asked toward the end about the next direction for Guitar Hero.  I didn’t feel that they had a good response (off the top of their heads) to it, so here’s my (had some time to think about it) opinion.

There are two directions to go from the current state of Guitar Hero, and in opposite directions.  I expect to see offerings in both directions in the future.

With regards to generative and collaborative music, there is the more creative direction (which as mentioned is less emotionally safe) in which people are collaborating in new composition.  It would be interesting for the software/game to lay a background and others to layer on that.  Perhaps with the software reacting and changing depending on player input.  Think drum circle with more instruments.

The other direction is toward more realism in instrument play.  I can’t recount how many times I’ve heard musician friends say “why would I want to do that when I can play real music?”  I can imagine a future generation of this style of gameplay that takes input from “real” instruments.  Using a MIDI interface is the most obvious choice.

Whether either of those directions will ever be as popular as the current Guitar Hero and ilk is unlikely in my opinion.  The dumbed-down, lowest common denominator game play is what leads to this genre’s popularity.

Video embeds for the conversation that got my mind churning:

Continue reading

I was recently reminded that because I was so busy this year and didn’t make it to SXSW, that I had forgotten about the SXSW Bit Torrent.  I went looking and it didn’t take long to find that some had indeed put one together for 2009.

I was quickly reminded that the AirPort Extreme Base Station by default protects me from the wilds of the Internet and to get the torrent running you have to bypass to ports and directly map them to your inside computer.

I found an old write-up to tell me how to do it, but it’s very out of date. I figured it out from there, but anyone who’s non-technical likely couldn’t.  

I’m not going to take the time right now to explain the details again.  But you should be able to follow his text and my screen shots to get the gritty work done and allow you to bypass your default firewall with the current 5.4.1 Airport Utility.

A few days from now I’ll have more music than I need and it will likely take me months to sift through it all.  But I do have a new, big media drive just waiting.

So, here are the screen shots, if you have any questions, let me know! Continue reading