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if you arent doing a relatively standard type of music, bars can be tough mostly because (1) people are not, in the main, really listening and (b) the sound usually sucks. well, there's a third thing: i am a pianist and i like horizontal pianos. most bars dont have them.
what really bugs me about playing bars is routinely shitty monitors.
i expect they bug everyone.
i prefer to be taken somewhere sonically that i did not expect to go. if there is a significant improvisational component to the performance, i prefer that all elements of the ensemble go out at once--none of this holding down the changes and chuggin along with a rhythm while a soloist does his or her thing--the whole group should jump into the void at once.
rock shows in the main bore me, so i dont go.
when i do, i like loud, i like energy and i like dissonance.
i like clean sound run by a competent sound guy.
for example manipulating/processing noise only really works in the context of clean sound----the cool stuff is in the details---you need to hear them.
i do not like hearing what i already have heard on recordings.
i like sets that places demands on the audience, that puts them in a position of either having to be there (listen/focus) or leave. aggression competence and focus.
i dont think of music as entertainment: it is more an assault.
but there should be something empty behind the assault.
getting to the zero is the hard part...for me, the sense of the zero, of emptiness is the main criterion that seperates levels of players.
theatrics dont mean much--well-lit wankers are no different for being well lit.
hip hop only when the turntablist is actually generating the beats.
my brother is a bluegrass musician, so from time to time i have to go to bluegrass shows--as i really dislike bluegrass in general, the marker of a good show is that i am not annoyed to be there at the end. it is not a form in which it makes any sense ot look for surpises, no sense to wait to be taken somewhere you didnt expect. thing is that many of the players are very good in their way, so i try to focus on that. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. i find that it works less often with bands that wear matching outfits on stage. but that is, i am sure, just me.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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