WEGO: August Enlighten Show

Set 1 (41 megs)
Set 2 (53 megs)

Here are the August recordings from WEGO's regular 2nd-Thursday gig at the Enlighten Cafe! The Orchestra for the evening included Woody Frank (guitar and voice), Ian McKagan (guitar and voice), Jesse Silvertrees (djembe, melodica, and voice) and Me Woods (bassbox and voice). We were also thrilled to have Patrick Lenon (assorted percussion) sitting in with us for the first set.

Even though I was still just about alone at 10-till-eight, by 8:15 the place was packed, and the hastily assembled group kicked right into an extra strong first-set. (I did clip out a short break early in the first set where we stopped to adjust the mix a bit … it turned out I had powered-down the left speaker at the end of sound-check and had forgotten to turn it back on again.)

The second set was perhaps a bit less consistent but still featured plenty of high-peaks of cohesion. And I have a suspicion that even the bits where the band may have felt a bit lost had their own peculiar musicality from the other side of the white-boards. In my view, the strongest aspect of our sound this particular evening was clearly the vocal harmonization. WOW, did the dense brassy harmonies all just seem to gel beyond the expected possibilities of improv at times!

(Obligatory bass-box tone-discussion paragraph:) This was my first mic'd show with the round-wound steel strings on the bass-box, and it was a heeee-yuuuuuge improvement. The tone was maybe still a little under-defined, but for once I had volume to spare! By the end of the night, I almost wished I hadn't ordered an electric pickup for it, but I think the pickup will probably give me even more of what I'm looking for. So I'll try to make a removable installation for that sometime before our September show.

Finally, apologies for the low-bitrate sound of the second set! … somehow in changing the batteries, the input levels got bumped down to the point where I'm needing to both compress and boost around 20db just to get it to roughly match the first set … sadness … though certainly better than losing it entirely.

(Special thanks to Marisa for the photos!)