Shelton / Healy 2-13-2009

Friday the 13th! Scary!

Not really. Freddy vs Jason? Alien vs Predator? Terrible movies definitely, but before this show started I had a pretty long talk with these flicks with Jordan Glenn, Chuck Johnson and Ben Bracken, all of whom also played this night at the Totally Intense Fractal MindGaze Hut in Oakland.

The first set was a piece by Chuck Johnson called Polystate. It's an audiovisual piece that he developed as an installation but is also able to perform with. The basics are the use of scales to control audio and visual processes. Ben Bracken performed it with him. The sound was very measured and steady - a full blanket of sound.

Trevor Healy and I played the second set. it was one of the most focused sets that I remember us playing and we made great transitions from place to place with only one thing agreed on before we played - the note to start on. I liked this. We created some very full sounding sections and really moved our dynamics throughout the set. I think Chuck recorded the set - so I'm looking forward to hearing that.

The third set was the duo of Jordan Glenn and Kanoko Nishi. Drums and Koto. They covered alot of ground, at first I thought the drums would be too dominant as the room has some reverberation which can lend itself to too much drum - but Jordan knows what he's doing and the balance worked well. They ended the set in a super solid way, completing the night. All three sets had similarities in terms of timing and patience, though the way that each duo achieved these qualities was very different.