Greetings, Line colleagues!
I had a live show last month at Austin’s Spiderhouse Ballroom - which included a pretty good crowd and noise. The month prior was spent recording frogs and wildlife, including a really rowdy flash flood and thunderstorm.
When we’re not in drought, Texas here is spoiled with great spring and summer weather - Thom Yorke famously got freaked out by our rain during an appearance, claiming in 2013: “A storm to end all storms! Lightning and thunder & rain like I have never seen!” - but that’s just another Tuesday in town here, Thom! We had a similar rain storm during this recent February (including an ice storm that was even more auditory) and both got recorded and loaded as separate instruments into a MicroSampler. We live near a frog pond (which also has owls and ducks) and they were fun to record on a full moon night. They got added in, as well.
So the idea was to put on a show with both weather, frogs, and electronics.
A few separate CV-controlled panner VCAs allowed for quadraphonic panning around the room (best of these being an Ekdahl Quad Massager) and to approximate that sound into stereo as a recording, I placed a few field stereo recorders around the place for a sub-mix.
The sound is a lot of eurorack and 5U (moog format) and a few pedals/sequencers/samplers
In terms of making things portable, I made a utlity cart with power supplies on the bottom, 5U and pedals on the middle rack, and eurorack on top. There’s a really useful USB powered power supply for eurorack that Synthrotek makes that was able to provide 200mA to allow a portable euro system for the few modules I needed, which I recommend for powering a few separate modules out of a case. The 5U gear is synthesizer.com box systems, except for a Trapezoid Generator (appears in track three) which is too deep for their skiff and I made a cardboard case housed in the utility cart with gaffer tape. The light bulbs and flashlight were used with a few light to CV sensors.
I hadn’t played out in years and it was very stressful putting the show together beforehand, but I’m thankful to have the recording and the experience of doing it.
Here’s the show if interested. Fun loud night! Some good moments: