Sunday, November 23, 2008

Not Artistic Enough to get it...

It's been quite some time already since this gig of ours. I figured the statute of limitations on not bashing the shit out of this gig has passed weeks ago.

So this is my post dedicated to an acoustic gig that myself, Briggs, and Islaw did for a production I will not name, during a time I will not specify, at a venue I will not mention.

What I will mention are my gripes about that night.

Audio Equipment Preparation. In any production, especially when it involves not only musical acts, but spoken word acts, it is necessary to have the right gear, and properly test it out. You would think they would provide mics that were suited for that purpose. One does get scared when both the house and production tech cannot find the root-cause of an overlying buzz that you hear coming out of the speakers. And you start getting scared when the mics are branded as "Philips" and "Panasonic" with thin wires, alluding to the fact that they were throw-in mics that came with their new DVD player. The clip of their one and only mic stand broke and they had no back-up or remedy prepared (i.e. duct tape like McGyver). I even had to rush back home and grab one of my mic stands just to accomodate for more than one mic simultaneously.

Talent Fee Distribution. Briggs, Islaw, and myself all have stable day jobs, so a sizeable talent fee is really not an expectation when we do gigs. We gig to enjoy sharing our music and feel the crowd reaction. But the baseline expectation is that the bands are at least given drinks and fed well. The lone bottle of wine that was given to us that tasted more like Cool-Aid than anything else, was essentially our talent fee. I suppose they couldn't really afford to do more for the acts that night because of the limited customer turn-out.

Act Choice. Granted we were part of the acts that night. But the reason why I go to gigs is to enjoy the other acts as well as our own set. For the life of me, I really couldn't enjoy the other acts that performed that night. The other acts surrounded around some free-verse poetry that seem to just repeat themselves over and over. (i.e. "Naglalaro ako ng Transformers, ng Transformers, ng Transformers..."). I started missing the impromptu poetry back when Sanctum Unmasct was still alive. At least that I enjoyed as tasteful free-verse poetry.

Weird Vibe. The production, the venue, and the people that came to watch, seem to give an overall vibe of forced artistic elitism and pretensiousness, whether or not there was really anything artistic that they were indulging in. Some of the poetry acts spent more time informing people of their next performances rather than actually performing. Most people there relegated the acts performing to background music/noise and kept up conversations that really didn't amount to anything enlightning or even humorous. You seem to be able to hear everything that goes on in the kitchen. Given that you can hear the blender's screams cutting right through the speakers for every variation of a shake that was ordered. People loved their shakes that night it seems.

So now that I got that out of my system. Below are some pictures of us playing that night, as well as a bootleg recording of one of the songs we played. I didn't bother uploading the rest of songs in our set precisely because of the crowd banter, blender screams, and speaker buzz.




The only redeeming factors of that night was of course a gig with some of my bandmates is still a gig. It cuts the ordinary routine as always. And the fact that some officemates actually went to watch the gig even though I didn't invite them. I wish they saw a full band set-up gig instead. Even though I kind of enjoyed that gig, I wasn't all the pleased with our output. I supposed the night just gave off an ambience that wasn't condusive for us to play well in. Aside from the fact that we really don't do acoustic performances in the first place.

So now to tie the title of this post to what I'm trying to say. Perhaps I'm just not artistic enough to see past all those irritations and annoyances that night. Perhaps I'm just not artistic enough to see the beauty of repeating the same line in a poetry verse 3-4 times over needlessly. It really could just boil down to my naiveness. I could be wrong with my impressions of that night. You think?

END OF LINE...

2 comments:

Euri said...

Hmm... It sounds better when you're there, ne?

Sorry I ruined the other ones. Kitchie Nadal saw you performing naman, so okay lang. =P

PS:
I'm good at taking pictures in a point and shoot cam, once in a while, I realized.

sundowndos said...

hehe kitchi nadal was there nga pala... no biggie... that's probably why it didn't come to mind when i was writing the post... not like she remembers us from that night either so... hehe...

nah you didn't ruin the other songs... there was just way too much "other noise" and we played crappily... hehe