Squeech plays live in Boston

Actually Lowell. There's a gallery space at 119 Chelmsford Street, and they have a regular feature of improvised music and video. On Friday the 13th (cue scary chord change), starting at about 7:30, I'll be one of the musicians, playing alongside a flute player who plugs his flute into a powerful synthesizer/groove box rig, and a saxophonist who will also play percussion. (I think.)

The video is the real draw, however. The video artist has a system that (1) accepts video signals from several different sources, including a live camera (2) mixes them in interesting ways-- wipes, cross-fades, chromakey-like effects, and even weirder combinations I don't know the words for (3) alters them in ways you used to have to take powerful hallucinogens to experience: reflections, mandalas, multiples, outlines, traces, color changes, and again even more outrageous distortions.

The other fun thing for me is, it's gonna be the debut appearance of the new bass amplifier I just acquired yesterday. It's a Line 6 Lowdown LD-150, a chopped-up black cube of daunting aspect that delivers 150 watts through a 12" speaker. The big draw of Line 6 is their sound modeling technology, where they've figured out the sound characteristics of favorite amplifiers of the good old days and encoded those characteristics in DSP firmware-- so essentially this amp has a bass pod built into it. In the hour I've devoted to this amp so far, my favorite sound is the one they call "Brit," which is their pet name for the old Marshall stack used by bands like Cream. I don't have any problem with sounding like Jack Bruce!

:hi:


:kick:

:hug:

Unless I was visting my folks in RI, which I won't be. But good luck!

I wonder what it means that all my fans live too far away to actually see me play :evilgrin:

good luck, though.

Sounds like its going to be an interesing performance. Have fun.

Not of the improv stuff.

Most of the time I do one of these posts, it's for Tim Mungenast, the singer/songwriter/guitarist in whose band I play bass. He has a Myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/timmungenast, and I'm on all those songs except "Candles." But he hasn't posted any of his improvisations, and he's not playing in Friday's gig either-- it's an ad hoc assemblage of people from a whole different camp. The next show with Tim is the week before Thanksgiving, at SkyBar in Somerville-- mark your calendars, folks!

And thanks for the good wishes.