Deciding what to take

Spent Thursday morning setting up the gear I planned to use at Immersion on a makeshift table in my bedroom, to see what room I would have. My original plan to take both my Nord Modulars was quickly shown to be very flawed as it became apparent that there would only just be room for one. So at the last minute I decided to take just my Nord G2, augmented by my Giga Delay for looping duties, so that I could improvise some live loops and play over them, with additional drones and textures provided by my SP-404 sampler.

I set this up and ran through some ideas and was quite satisfied I would be able to come up with something interesting and varied for my 25 minute set.

Then I broke it all down and packed it away into 2 main bags, one for the G2, leads and power supplies, the other for the SP-404, Giga Delay, Mixer, and VF-1 multi-effects.

I also needed another bag for clothes, toiletries, books to read on the train, mp3 player and CDRs to sell.

When it was all packed it was pretty obvious that it would be pretty difficult to carry these all on public transport, so I ended up strapping them to a set of folding wheels I normally use for carrying the bigger stuff round at major gigs.

Getting there

My train back to London was at 3:30 so I left the house about 2:15 to make sure I was in plenty of time as I had to catch a bus into town then walk from one side to the other to get to the railway station, which I did fairly easily, making it to the station by about 3:00.

On the train I unstrapped everything and put the stuff on the overhead racks as I didn't really want to let it out of my site. After a fairly uneventful train journey, I arrived in London at about 5:10.

Then it was a short tube ride from Kings Cross to Old Street, which would have been a lot easier if there weren't steps to negotiate at both ends.

From Old Street it was about a 20 minute walk to the venue, the Flea Pit, on Columbia Street, off Hackney Road. Arriving at 6pm I met Spencer the promoter and then set my stuff up and did a quick sound check, before heading off again to find my overnight accommodation, some halls of residence about 1.29 miles away.

It took me longer than expected to get to the halls of residence as it turned out to be quite a long walk, but on the way I managed to work out which bus would get me back to the venue, so after I'd checked in and got my keys I got a 26 bus back, arriving about 7:30.

So with half an hour to go before I was due to play, I got a well deserved beer and some falafels and sat down to wait for my turn to go on. This is usually my least favourite part of any performance as even though I'm pretty confident of my abilities nowadays, I still get nervous just before a gig. In fact I discovered I was too nervous to eat so asked Paul the landlord to look after my food 'til after I'd played.

Going into the performance part of the venue, the so-called 'pit', I found Spencer doing his thing as SS_R, playing some very nice droney stuff.

Before going on I asked Spencer to take some photos.

Playing

Soon enough it was time to go on and I started my set with some nice analog FX from the G2, then gradually faded in a spacey drone from the SP-404 and then started layering and looping sounds from the G2 over the top. I caught the odd glimpse of the visual and they looked quite dark and spacey and pretty appropriate. During the set I manged to fit in some nice layered sequenced bits using looped stuff from the G2 arpeggiator and a nice piano break (that accidentally got looped too) with plenty of weird noises and drones and even some melodic choir stuff. Unfortunately the sound quality from the PA wasn't as good as it could be, with one of the speakers seeming to be distorting during the louder parts of my set. I had a few scary moments when I realised I'd looped bits I hadn't meant to or not pressed the load button on the G2 when I'd dialled up my next sound, but apart from that I think it all went quite well and soon enough it was time to bring things to a close, at which point I got some nice applause.

I also got some good comments from Spencer and Paul, which was also nice.

Now I could relax and enjoy the rest of the acts. Next up was dj0273, who performed with just a laptop, bobbing his head in time to his rather intense, beat driven music, at times melodic, at other times quite harsh and noisy.

During his set the projector died, so before the next act there was a break to get it repaired, during which I packed all my stuff away in record time.

After this short unscheduled break, the next act, Mr No, went on to perform a set that I would describe as being mostly modulated, rhythmic noise, with the odd bass line. Mr No also had a laptop and a Novation keyboard controller, but he didn't 'play' it, he just used its knobs to manipulate his sounds. His set was quite hypnotic, especially in conjunction with the stark black and white visuals from the frashly repaired projector.

After Mr No we had the planned interval, then Michael Santos, a late addition to the bill, replacing Soundhacker, was on, with his laptop, to 'perform' some music based around sonic manipulation of recordings of guitar sounds. This was fairly interesting timbrally, but the visuals didn't seem to fit as well as with Mr No, so the 'performance' seemed to be lacking something. Watching people looking at laptop screens just isn't that stimulating.

After Mr Santos came JDTJDJ from 'Ireland and Norwich' apparently. JD briefly described what they were going to do before they started, which was to improvise using their laptops and some electronic toys and stuff, and that as they hadn't discussed anything before hand it may take a while for things to come together. When they started they both put on 'masks' of their own faces and as expected from their pre-amble, it did take a while for things to 'come together', starting very chaotically, with lost of random electronic squeals and buzzes from manipulated toys and radios and mini Marshall amplifiers over a looped melody, then sampled voices and other starnge stuff, including a very large balloon with a contact mic rubbed against one of the PA speakers, making strange low humming sounds.

After the gig I had time to have a brief chat with Spencer, then it was time to head off to catch my bus to the halls of residence. Caught the bus and got my gear back to the halls then nipped out to gets ome food, then was straight off to bed as it had been a very tiring, but very enjoyable day.