Neon Brown Presents: "Woodland Acoustic Orchestra" (April '09)!

Set 1 58 megs

Set 2 25 megs

Here's another full evening with the ever-mutating Woodland Acoustic Orchestra. This month's lineup consisted of Noah Adler (Mandolin), Dennis Jolin (Percussion), Aaron Stepp (6-string Bass), and Me Woods (Acoustic Guitar and Voice).  After the minor sound-reinforcement debacle of two weeks previous, I brought my own mini-PA to this show, which allowed us to easily plop the speakers down in some much-more-ideal locations. I suspect the sound from most random places in the audience is usually pretty decent even with the built-in PA, but having greater mixing freedom certainly made it much easier for us to hear each other clearly and -- coupled with some much-more-thoughtful mic-positioning -- definitely yielded a better balance on the recording.

Even still, things took a while to get rolling. Something about the way we started seemed to push us into a corner from which it took a while to figure out how to step away. I'm guessing the general vibe for most of us was something like "man, I feel like I'm already playing too many notes to easily move this somewhere else, but it still feels like we could use some more momentum". To be fair to all of us, the Acoustic Orchestra is a slightly unconventional and ever-shape-shifting beast, and it can often take a while to figure out how to work with (or maybe relax-into) the balance of sonic textures on any given night. Also, we were still a little bit under critical mass for ideal "Acoustic Orchestra" action. Generally it seems that a minimum of 5 players makes it easier for each player to find a nice sparse approach that allows plenty of room for listening, more-effortless mutation, and greater overall momentum...which means signaled-changes can have huge impact without bringing things to a halt.

Nonetheless, for whatever reason (in spite of my many theories, it really *is* a stubbornly mysterious process) things seemed to magically gel about half-way through the first set and -- for me at least -- floated on various incarnations of this inspiration for the remainder of the night. (And really, even the first half of the first set has plenty of interesting ideas.  Just consider jumping ahead a bit if you if you're not enjoying the beginning...it really *does* get quite good!) As with many of the best Acoustic Orchestra shows, multiple simultaneous interlocking melodies form a rich grooving tapestry full of new sparkling details on each listen.

Lyrics, as usual, were mostly lifted and twisted from the Ballard News Tribune, although the end of the first set features what I thought was a rather entertaining extended piece of blather.  This bit was inspired by the very cool surrealist art that had been hanging at the Chai House since at least the previous Juggler's Challenge show (thanks to Dennis for the photos here!  

...if this art is still there next time, I'll try to remember to write down the artist's name and post any relevant links here).

Okay, that's it for me on this one. As always, if you were there or have been sampling the recordings, feel free to add your own comments/context here in the comments section!

Neon Brown Presents: "JCR(16)"!

Set 1 46 megs

Set 2 36 megs

Here are two fine sets of Juggler's Challenge music featuring a fantastic quintet of TQ Berg (Destroyer), Dave Foley (Drums and Vocals), Dennis Jolin (Guitar), Donovan Raymond (Bass and Vocals), and Me Woods (Direct Guitar and Vocals). All of these guys are versatile improvisers and great listeners -- and therefore extremely well suited to the audience-interactive format.

This was to be the first Juggler's Challenge Revival episode with the new overhead-projector, and so I expected a bit of extra complexity during the pre-show setup. What I didn't expect was the Chai House's already-hobbled PA 'jumping the shark' sometime over the previous 2 weeks. It's hard to even recreate in my mind the bizarre configuration in which the remaining barely-functional speaker-cords had been hooked up to the power-amp, but the net result was about 40 minutes of fussing with it only to achieve a mono signal with the highs and the lows located in completely different parts of the room. I'll test it again over the next few shows to see if it improves, but from here on out, I'll also be lugging along my own PA, just in case.It took a while to get the Challengers going with the new transparency-based input (I'm suspecting that my attempts to cajole them into action were being translated into a muddy jumble by the remaining PA components.), but we did actually get our first transparency up and projected before the end of the first set (the "innuendo-fueled-buttrock-anthem"). And, thanks to some spacious and synergetic free-grooving by the band, the half-hour wait was quite enjoyable (for me anyway :)!

Interactivity really picked up for the second set, with a second mad-lib song (the "fuzzy" love song), a great 'musical-experience-in-10-words-or-less', and a sweet tune based on a set of lyrics written entirely by the Challengers. We even got our first ever abstract-graphical score designed in the way that I had imagined they would be! Kudos to David Kimber for drawing something that was actually abstract and which could reasonably be interpreted from left-to-right. I sorta botched the directing of it (once we had set our 1-minute time-limit, it would've been better for everyone to just glance at the timer to help them determine where they were in the score rather than wait for me to advance the marker, which of course I wasn't doing because I was playing :), but I'm going to post a photo here, in case it inspires any future score-artists to build on this very elegant concept. Note that the staff-line here isn't literal (with only 4 lines)...only suggestive. Rockin' good!

Well, that's about it for this one from me. But again, if you were there or are listening to the recordings, feel free to add any entertaining details that I might've forgotten here in the comments section.

(Oh, another quick note: Near the beginning of the show, I announce "Weds, April 8th, 2008. But that was just the flavored syrup talking...this show was in fact recorded this past week, which is well into 2009.)

Neon Brown Presents: "Woodland Acoustic Duo/Trio/Quartet"!

Prologue 12 megs
Set 1 43 megs
Set 2 30 megs

Here is a prologue and two sets by a small-ish Acoustic Orchestra of Dennis Jolin (joining me in the prologue and throughout the evening on various percussion, melodica, and even banjo for a brief second), Aaron Stepp (laying down the magical idiosyncratic grooves on Fretless Electric Bass), Donovan Raymond (Piano at the end of each set) and Me Woods (mostly Guitar and Voice, with brief stints at dumbek, wood-blocks and manual-tube-driven-voice-leslie).


I had thought this might be one of our larger Orchestras, but -- true to form -- I sent out a very late reminder to the musicians (well really I just forwarded the show-listing with their names in it) and by 8pm it appeared that it might just be Dennis and me...which it actually *was* for the 10 minute prologue...but Aaron showed up with his bass towards the end of that, and we even added Donovan Raymond on the Chai House Piano for about 10-20 minutes at the end of each set.

This was a weird one for me. There was a huge appreciative audience the whole evening, with lots of friends in attendance, and I knew we had a great group of musicians, but with the PA speakers' super-wide spacing (about 12 feet off of the edge of each side of the stage) I was having a hard time hearing things in balance and so was struggling to find harmonic/rhythmic coherence and a place to settle in the mix. My playing in particular felt like it was lurching along and tripping up the beat fairly regularly. Even the vocal additions (from the Ballard News Tribune and the want ads from the back of the Seattle Weekly and the Stranger) seemed precariously perched atop the crumbling grooves. (And the 'Super-Barista' in the second set is a nearly incomprehensible hideous sprawling beast that only a fan of the most disorganized overlapping melody and lyrical wandering could love!) But then, near the end of both sets as Donovan would join in on the Piano, we'd all work through a challenging 5 minutes or so of trying to figure out how to play in the new landscape before being suddenly and mysteriously overtaken by a wave arising from nowhere and carrying us to the climax of each set on a smoothly building drone of ecstasy. (Start at 27:00 in set 1 and 17:20 in set 2 to jump right to these portions.) Listening back now, I'm actually enjoying most of the night here, and I'm particularly blown away by how many different sounds are coming out of Dennis' area of the mix...some truly diverse and well-seasoned hand-percussion!

The recording here suffers from some of the same problems as my ears did at the time: My cavalier attempt to not over-think the positioning of the mics has positioned them too far from the PA speakers and too close to the percussion and especially my dry leg shakers. If you start playing each set at a volume that sounds appropriate for the wash of cracked nuts that comes first, you'll end up feeling like you're listening to a guy shaking a rattle in time to a band that's playing in the other room. If, on the other hand, you imagine that you've walked into a jam-party late enough that the only available seat was right next to the guitarist's brashly-rattling leg, perhaps it's possible to tolerate a volume where you'll be able to absorb some of what the other musicians were up to. I've also done my best to apply some selective EQ and compression, slightly improving the balance.

My left leg was sporting a new set of bells that -- as my partner Tina will readily attest -- I spent several evenings tying onto various unsatisfactory leg-attachment devices before settling on an "elegant" system that knots them into a single length of panty-hose. It took at least 3 minutes or so before individual bells began tumbling loose onto the stage (...but there's a simple fix for that which I won't go into now :).

This night was *also* the first Chai House visit of my 9-week old daughter Lucy (pictured here with our friend Melvin) who, to my slight surprise and great delight, seemed to really enjoy herself -- apparently staring intently at the musicians and wriggling aggressively throughout the first set.

Neon Brown Presents: "JCR(15)"!

Set 1 50 megs
Set 2 30 megs

Here are two sets by a drummerless-but-plenty-solid-nonetheless trio of TQ Berg (Destroyer), Colin Higgins (Electric Guitar...in his first appearance with NBP in several years due to his busy guitar-teaching schedule), and Me Woods ("Bass" + Loops and Vocals). ...an anonymous artist's rendering is included to the left here.

The theme for the evening was Juggler's Challenge, and the first set is indeed partly influenced by input from the Listeners (Challengers). I set out 4x6 cards and a noxious Sharpie and -- much like the past two Juggler's Challenge Revival episodes -- sang/exhorted the audience to put anything on the cards that they thought might make interesting inspiration for music. First set we got a great page of lyrics (by a guy named David that I'm pretty sure I've met a few times at the Chai House before), and a beautifully-minimalist card with the words 'A Boy Named "Pines"' on it, and even a brief guest-vocal appearance by the afore-parenthetically-mentioned David. I still don't have the overhead projector that I'm certain will really kick-start this Juggler's Challenge concept for people, but it seemed that the small crowd was paying attention enough to keep up with what we were working on anyway.

(Left: Daylight Savings Time had just kicked in the previous weekend. The abrupt change to setting up the gear before sunset is always cool and a little pleasantly melancholy somehow.)

Back to the music: In spite of my idea that I would try not to, "bass" was looped, and it did indeed seem to provide a nice bed for all manner of harmonic and textural exploration. All three of us were holding back a bit it seemed, allowing a gentle and spacious collective vibe to emerge. It's been a while since the last time all three of us played together, but it's possible that people besides me will hear a certain mutual confidence in our approach here. Nobody (except possibly that annoying bassist! ;) is trying too hard to "make it happen" and so the music is relaxed, even when it builds energy. Speaking of energy, anyone who was there for the "great bass-induced power-amp explosion of 2009" (see "Ninja Poodles on Beets" below), might be mildly entertained to hear that I had replaced my deceased neon-brown-era power amp with a wildly overpowered hEEnd-era Peavey CS-800. It performed admirably, though I fear that with repeated uses my back wouldn't!

The crowd was significantly sparser for the second set, and so -- partly due to my neglecting to mention the format for the evening again -- my only themed-utterance was mockery along the lines of "Screw you guys for not providing any input in the second set!" But the trio's approach really seemed to grow a bit here, with a less reserved and even less idiomatic approach to our weaving and tumbling lines.

So that's about it on this one from me, but please add your own comments here if you were there or listened to the recordings and noticed anything entertaining that I might've pointed out.

Neon Brown Presents: "Woodland Acoustic Orchestra" (Feb '09)!

Set 1 47 megs

Set 2 32 megs

(+ Bonus Timelapse Movie of the second set 4.7 megs)

February 25th started with a trio of me and two guys I'd never played with before: Noah Adler (Mandolin) and Aaron Stepp (Fretless Electric Bass). The funny thing is that it wasn't the first NBP for either of them! Both Noah and Aaron made their debut at the previous month's acoustic-orchestra night, during the first week of my new baby daughter Lucy's life -- when even dragging an acoustic guitar to the Chai House was still sounding a little ambitious and off-topic...though if it had been a week later, I would've loved to have brought her out to just sit on the couch and drool to the grooves. (I believe that unrecorded evening was a quartet of John Beezer (Guitar) -- in his last NBP before his move to New York City -- Dennis Jolin (Nylon String Acoustic through Wah), and Aaron and Noah...supposedly, it was very mellow and trance-like that evening, and -- I'd guess from my more recent jam with them -- awesome.)

But back to the February: What a great trio it turned out to be!! 

We discussed possible signals before we started, but ended up having plenty of momentum and diversity to quickly forget them. I was admittedly a little rusty from lack of recent fretboard time, but Aaron and Noah were sharp and versatile and it seemed we quickly found and explored a common love of what I'll try to describe as "tweaky odd-time groove mutation" -- where a group locks in on a repeating syncopated line and then each player in harmony gradually pushes the rhythm and angles further and further away from the path of least resistance (see 15:30 or 36:30), while simultaneously maintaining a consistent and well-defined meter. The level of attention required for this type of playing almost by necessity becomes exhausted from time to time, and so we would break down (probably a welcome breath for the listeners as well) into a wide range of more spacious and conventionally-rhythmic movements as well. I'm already looking forward to next time with these guys. (Oh yeah, and the "lyrics" that creep in from time to time during this set were from the back-page-classified-ads from the Stranger.)

Second set, we were joined by the always melodic, energetic, and inspiring Chris Powers (Acoustic Guitar), briefly by a percussionist who I don't believe I'd met before, and eventually by Daniel Nelon, whose smooth and modally innovative vocal work carried us to the end of the set and decorated a sweetly-harmonized "last call" right before the final bell. Daniel is always a great addition, but after the brief taste of 'what-could-be' here, we agreed to bring him back for more of the show on a day when I've got more lyrical creativity and we can really explore the chorus-harmonies! I'm looking forward to that too. :) ...and also to any listener or player comments on this post or on your experience of the show or recordings. Please add them here in the comments section!

Neon Brown Presents: "Juggler's Challenge Revival (Episode 14)"!

Set 1 46.8 megs

Set 2 45.3 megs

Here's another high-energy Juggler's Challenge Revival (episode #14) with Zane and Anders (formerly of the Consul)...this time with the added pleasure of their new -- and fantastic!! -- drummer, David Testa (in his first NBP appearance). I can't say enough about the bad-ass-itude of this lineup, especially along the axes of intricacy, syncopation, mood, and balls-to-the-wall energy! It's always a bit of a challenge at the Chai House keeping the vocals up to the energy of the instruments with these guys, but I think we did okay this time, with one PA-speaker near us as sort of a monitor and another over closer to the bar and aimed right out into the middle of the house (if you've been following my comments from previous postings, you'll know that I view 'ease-of-lyrical-comprehension' to be an essential element of a good Juggler's Challenge show...otherwise, it's all just distracting from the jams, right?).

Juggler's Challenge Process Notes: The new thing that I wanted to try this time was to have the audience call out the key-changes, using a simple three-column multiple-choice interface. I think this is a decent idea, but the interface seemed not to encourage further changes once a key had been selected and so -- after a few heavily-solicited changes -- it mostly languished on the coffee-table, unnoticed by Juggler and Challenger alike. Rather than using up an entire white-board, I think the next step for this sort of thing would be a three-dial system, with the hope that big dials will really lure people to touch and re-set them. As with episode 13, I simply gave out the other white-board with a vague request for pictures and/or words. Aaron Stepp (basist for the previous and upcoming Acoustic Orchestra shows), stepped right up and filled the board from top to bottom with no less than 6 brilliantly-quirky song-ideas, continuously re-filling at the top with the same high-quality challengement (that's right, I said "challengement"!) as we moved down the list. Also, it's been suggested several times now that an overhead projector would be a welcome addition to the Juggler's Challenge experience. That way, the conceptual input would hopefully be easily readable by both the Juggler's *and* the Challengers, increasing the general interest-in and understanding-of how the input was being interpreted in the music and lyrics. Hopefully more on that soon...  

Back to the show:  We had a great crowd throughout the evening, with most people sticking around from first-to-last notes. The recording of the first set is a mixed bag. The music (after a couple of minutes of mild technical difficulty) is lively and diverse, but volumes were more out of wack and both mics were pretty far from the PA speakers, so you might just want to ignore the vocals rather than trying to follow the buried conceptual threads. I made some adjustments to both the mics and the PA for the second set and the lyrics/concepts are definitely starting to creep through here on the recording. The band was really cooking by this point and the audience was large and responsive. The whole show is worth posting, but if you're at all pressed for time, the second set is where it's at!

So yeah, check these out.  And, whether you were there or not, if you really liked a particular section or have some context or clarification to add, please call it out in the comments section here!

thanks for listening,

-andrew

Neon Brown Presents: "Ninja Poodles On Beets"!

Set 1 51 megs

Set 2 23 megs

Here it is: the first NBP of 2009, and the first new Juggler's Challenge Revival episode since July! Two sets in two unedited clips. The lineup for this one was a quartet of John Beezer (Direct Guitar), TQ Berg (Electric Guitar), Dennis Jolin (Drums) and Me Woods ("Bass" -- really an octavized bass-amplified plank-tuned guitar). I'd been feeling pleasantly low-energy for most of the afternoon and was starting to waffle on doing the usual Juggler's Challenge elements, but with the house nearly-full at 8pm, it was clear that some sort of audience-interaction was called for. Trying to split the difference with my mellow energy, I just gave the whiteboards out to the Challengers with very little briefing (maybe mentioning something about lyrics and pictures). Before 10 minutes had passed (usually the first input has to be pried out of their hands at around 20, at which point things start picking up) there was already a full set of lyrics and most of another.

The band worked really well with each other right from the start, leaking out a seamless stream of endlessly morphing wide-panned uplifting melancholia. Space and emotional-texture was the order of the evening. So great to have TQ back again! Originally known to me as a bassist, he's a long-time collaborator -- since at least 1995...? -- and has always been a musician with a truly unique earpoint, but I've got to say his guitar playing, which he started seriously much more recently has gotten to be amazing, especially his ability to improvise effectively in his own unique voice. Beezer made another step in his gradual transition to a full-blown Electric Guitar appearance by standing up and somehow making completely clean guitar the lushest sound in the room. And Jolin was fantastic on his first NBP-turn on drums, rolling out waves of organic groove, even around my muddy bass loops! With the huge variety of instruments he plays, you can expect to see lots more of him too in the coming year.

Near the end of the first set, I thought perhaps we'd do something for just one more white-board of lyrics but during the beginning of that movement one of my FX pedals suddenly turned off and then on again. Mysteriously, I couldn't get any sound again... Eventually, amidst the faint smell of fireworks, I noticed that my power-amp wasn't lit up anymore. I'm assuming the smell was the mini-mushroom-cloud from its sudden demise (a great excuse to finally get a decent bass-head...?). I plugged into the PA for the second set.

The Chai House had switched bookers again and there was no posted title for the evening. When somebody came up to the bar while we were setting up and asked what was up for the evening, the barista and I whipped up "Ninja Poodles on Beets" -- which actually isn't too bad as NBP titles go! There were a few riffs on it right at the top of the show and a couple other times when things slowed down, but clearly -- as with the copious audience input -- there was lots more there left un-mined.

Set 2 includes a sharp and timely "tribute" to the Bush years by guest-vocalist Brian (don't know his last name...perhaps Beezer can add it in the comments here). I didn't even know what he was singing about at the time, but on the recording it's plenty clear and -- I though -- hilarious.

The Challengers gradually expanded their lyrical input, embedding some crazy drawings (including one -- which I wish I'd been able to photograph before it was erased -- of a bulging-eyed demon barfing out various words) and even a masterful board where the words and the art seemed to fuse into a single abstract musical score (photo here). Looking at it again, I realize my riffs on this last one really just began to taste the tip of the juice-berg.

In closing this gargantuan post (perhaps I need a self-imposed word-limit), I'd like to again encourage you all to add any of your own recollections or comments here in the 'comments' so that more than my own ramblings are part of the context for listeners who weren't there and even for those who were, should they come back to this post in the distant future.

Thanks for listening!

-andrew

(in addition to the other sets posted below, there are still a few of the older shows up at http://www.neonbrown.com/jotw.html )