Roughly a week ago, on last saturday (the 19th of august I believe), Self and Other played their first show in a house in Oakland. The crowd seemed to be mainly art students from SCAI, but further inquiry revealed budding pastry chefs and what would colloquially be known as dudes also at the space. The show featured 4 predominantly electronic/experimental artists performing. We played first, and there were a few interesting hurdles to the space that hindered a lot of our plans for playing. But to digress, stage presentation is something that can be incredibly important for the "politics" of the band.
Originally Rob and I had planned on creating an elaborate light + costume display, involving a sheet, religious and greek iconography, strobe lights...etc. However, due to the abrupt nature of our formation, we decided that our time was better spent practicing. Funny how that works. The decision to face the audience and perform in a spectacular fashion I feel serves to create a show that functions more as an art installation - the artist does not directly interact with the audience as themselves, but either allows the art to be the interactive medium or to cloak themselves in their expression and have it speak for them, as it were.
Once the costumes and lights shenanigans were put away or at least on hold, the face of the band became different; it became us! Since we are not singing at the moment, it is difficult to determine how to face the audience, specifically because rob and I both switch off between our respective string instruments(Gabe - guitar, Rob - Bass) and drums. We resolved this essentially by deciding, once again, to focus on the music. Rob and I just try to watch each other to ensure that we are making the right transitions and instrument changes. Once we actually know our songs well enough to make that unnecessary, we may have some issues about having to face the audience again. Oh well.
Back to the first show! We played in a small house that really didn't have enough room for us, so it was difficult to switch from drums to instrument. We hadn't practiced in a while, and it went about as you'd expect - we were sloppy and had too many delays. But the hopeful thing was that there were tangible moments when people were into our songs, and really it was our own between-songs miscues that were the most grievous. We were sharing my DD-3 delay pedal for certain parts, and when practicing never considered the minute or so it took to set it up of much consequence. When you have twenty people watching you do it in the dark, impatiently, who moments before had been into the song, it becomes a very long nervewracking experience. I put the pedal underneath one of the cymbal stands, and the rest of the show took a turn for the gruesome, as I had to keep stabbing for the pedal and barely succeeding. Although afterwards I had to walk around for forty minutes to cool off, apparently people told Rob that they were into us. As a band, that's all you really want.
Our second show went much better. We pulled into Austin after various journeyings that involved waking up thursday morning and watching the sun rise over the grand canyon we went to Arcosanti, and Meteor Crater en route to driving 1400+ miles by Friday afternoon, when we pulled into the house we were playing at around 7. We got to practice for an hour (and Rob had bought a DD-7! delay pedal, which meant that we would not bleed away our momentum with a harrowing switchover) and then eventually played in a house around noon. We didn't play quite loud enough, and the atmosphere of the show was strange (we are a neo shoegaze I guess band that focuses on gauzy guitar effects and intricate bass lines) for us; the other bands were solo dudes playing ukulele and banjo respectively, who were story-tellers. I like to think that eventually our songs will tell stories, but I'm interested in non-verbal ways of doing so. Regardless, the show went really well for us. Here's a video of most of one song.
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