Music

Music is a necessity. Though I focus mostly on alternative/industrial/EBM/electronic styles, my tastes are eclectic and wide-ranging.

Voltaire at the Vogue

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Just a few quick impressions, because it’s way past my bedtime on a weeknight (and having to say that before it’s even 1am is so depressing…).

Excellent show.

Wandered up to the Vogue at just a tad after 9pm and headed in. Got to say hello to some of the few people I know — Ogre, Mickey, and Kayo — and then ran into Richard just a few moments later. Ended up getting a table right up by the side of the stage, with a perfect view.

The Arid Sea opened, who I knew pretty much nothing about. Not bad at all, though admittedly, not so good that I’m going to be rushing out to pick up an album. A good opening show.

Voltaire came up shortly afterwards. While on his albums he has backing musicians, his performance was simply him and an acoustic guitar. He started by walking up to the mic and saying, “Hi! I’m…Rammstein!” and then proceeded to do a tongue-in-cheek cover of “Du Haßt Mich” (“You / You love / You love this / Even though you don’t know what I’m saying.”)

The next song was “Ex-Lover’s Lover”, and then he went through a good number of songs that I didn’t know (as The Devil’s Bris is the only album I own — something that will have to change), but were all very entertaining.

He prefaced a song about being eaten by cannibals by talking about how he’d just done a show in Japan the week before, and while he was able to do his between-song chatter in Japanese, the songs themselves were in English, so the Japanese audience didn’t pick up on all of the puns in his songs. He did say that the show in Japan went really well, though, and so he’d decided to do the exact same performance, since it went over so sucessfully — and then proceeded to speak in Japanese.

Between two of the songs he took a moment to read a few short passages from a small book he’s just put out, What is Goth?, commenting that “the surest way to a girls…(long pause)…heart…is suck-ass Goth poetry.”

There was actually a lot of fun between-song banter, and since much of the music I was hearing for the first time, that’s much of what I’m remembering. He told a story about going to the PTA meeting for his six-year old’s school, a fancy private school in New York, and realizing that both Dave Gahan (the lead singer of Depeche Mode) and David Bowie also had children in the same school (“The parent choir is going to rock!”).

Also, just before a very sweet (if disturbing) lullabye “written to scare my son to death, apparently,” he told another short story about his son. Apparently he came home and heard one of his son’s friends talking to the nanny, and declaring that, “that coat smells like his dad.” At his point, Voltaire paused, hiding around the corner to find out just how bad he smelled.

“What does his dad smell like?” asked the nanny.

“Evil.” (Much laughter here from the audience.)

Then the nanny followed up on this. “And what does evil smell like?”

And then, very matter-of-factly, the friend just said, “Pretty good, actually.”

He ended up finishing his show with “When You’re Evil,” only with a slight twist to the final lyrics:

It gets so lonely being evil.
What I’d do to see a smile,
Even for a little while,
And no one loves you when you’re DJ Eternal Darkness…

All in all, much fun, and well worth staying up past my bedtime for.

iTunes “Anniversary” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:35).

Jason Webley Halloween Show 2004

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Jason Webley Halloween Show, Seattle, WA

Prairie and I went to Jason Webley’s Halloween/Deathday show last night.

The show, of course (and as always), was incredible, and I’ll try to get a better writeup later on today. For now, though, I’ve uploaded a photoset from last night to Flickr.

The pictures don’t have full descriptions yet (another as-soon-as-possible project), but they start with the gathering of fans outside Town Hall, go through the entire show, and then follow us all out through Freeway Park until Jason left us yet again.

Enjoy!

Eminem: Mosh

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Mosh

I’ve never been a fan of Eminem. I tend to find his music boring, and his lyrics violent, misogynistic, homophobic, and offensive.

That said…

Hot damn this video is a powerful piece of work.

From Salon’s writeup:

With his history of homophobia and his long-running beef with MoveOn supporter Moby, Eminem is an even less likely lefty hero than Howard Stern. But the just-released video for his new anti-Bush song “Mosh,” makes “Fahrenheit 9/11” look like a GOP campaign spot, and it will almost certainly reach an audience that wouldn’t think of shelling out for a documentary.

The beautifully animated video, which is directed by Ian Inaba, opens with a classroom. At the front is a man in a blue suit, his face buried in an upside down children’s book that says “My Pet,” with a picture of a bush. Just as the man is revealed to be Eminem, the scene changes, and we see the singer taping up newspaper stories to a wall — “Sick Wounded Troops Held in Squalor,” says one. “Civil Liberties at Stake,” says another. “Bush Knew,” says a third.

In five minutes, Eminem manages a furious indictment of the administration that will likely resonate among many troops in Iraq as well as disaffected kids here at home.

After watching the video, I’m still no fan of the music. But wow.

This is good.

Pity it didn’t come out a few months ago.
iTunes “Closer (Further Away)” by Nine Inch Nails from the album Closer to God (1994, 5:45).

Shots of Gig’s Music Theatre

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Gigs, Anchorage, AK Continuing in my little bout of nostalgia for my days running around at Gig’s, tonight I get to present a set of shots from the club, taken roughly between 1997 and 1998 or so.

There are actually a lot more pictures than just these in the pile that I just discovered, however, I’m holding off on posting them just yet, as they’re a lot of old pictures of my group of friends from back then. Possibly eventually, but for now, this will do.

Some shots of the building, and some shots of a few of the bands that played there from time to time. Most of these shots were given to me by clubgoers at a point when I was working on the Gig’s website.

Anyway, feel free to browse and enjoy — some of you might even be able to join me in my nostalgia! ;)

Flyers from Gig’s Music Theatre, 1997-1998 (repost)

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Gigs 071198 I’ve mentioned before that back in Anchorage, I was resident DJ for Gig’s Music Theatre, a non-alcoholic all-ages alternative club.

While I was DJ’ing there, I also ended up producing most of the club’s promotional flyers. I posted these a while ago as a TypePad photo album, but now that I’ve moved off of TypePad, I’ve just moved them all over into a Flickr photo set.

While I’m no great graphic designer, every so often I’d come up with something I like, so the collection ranges the gamut from butt-ugly to pretty decent. Enjoy (or snicker, whatever the case may be…)!

The Death of Superman

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Superman is dead.

“Superman” actor Christopher Reeve, who turned personal tragedy into a public crusade and from his wheelchair became the nation’s most recognizable spokesman for spinal cord research, has died. He was 52.

Reeve went into cardiac arrest Saturday while at his Pound Ridge home, then fell into a coma and died Sunday at a hospital surrounded by his family, his publicist said. He was 52.

Rest in peace, Chris.

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The DJ tried to kill me

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Last night at The Vogue was really good — Ogre was DJing, standing in for Evan, and he kept making it damn near impossible for me to get off the dance floor. Always a good thing, of course, since it means that the music is consistently good — but then he topped it all off by playing Pop Will Eat Itself‘s “Can U Dig It?“, off of This is the Day…This is the Hour…This is This! I’m a big PWEI fan, and would never have expected to hear that at a club. Too cool.

iTunes “Def.Con.One” by Pop Will Eat Itself from the album This is the Day…This is the Hour…This is This! (1989, 3:59).

Once More, With Feeling

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As I’ve mentioned on here every so often, I’ve been working my way through the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series from beginning to end by renting the DVDs from NetFlix. I’m up to season six now (which means I’m going to have to take a break pretty soon, as season seven isn’t out for a little while yet), and I’m still thoroughly enjoying the show.

Season four had what is so far my all-time favorite episode — ‘Hush‘ — but last night I watched what’s now a very close second: ‘Once More, With Feeling‘.

In deference to friends who are also working their way through Buffy for the first time, the rest of these ramblings is behind the cut… Now, I’d heard about ‘Once More With Feeling’ (a.k.a. “Buffy — The Musical”) before hand, but I knew nothing about it beyond that it was a musical episode, so I was really looking forward to seeing it. I didn’t know how they were going to present it (music and spoken word, like a true musical; purely music, operetta-style; possibly something else), or how they were going to make it work within the confines of the show — though, admittedly, with a show like Buffy it’s easy enough to explain nearly anything away with a little creative work.

I knew I was going to be in for a treat when the show opened to a widescreen ratio and old movie style credits. Obviously they weren’t going to go about this halfway! I spent the rest of the next hour with a goofy grin on my face, often laughing out loud as the trademark wordplay worked its way into the songs.

Musically, while it’s not perfect — the cast are actors, after all, and not professional singers (though Anthony Stewart Head and Amber Benson both do quite well) — it is a lot of fun, with styles bouncing all over the place, from soft-shoe jazz to rock power ballads, and even a few reprises of earlier themes popping up later on in the show. Whedon is obviously a fan of musicals, and that shows throughout the show, not just in the music, but also in his framing of the shots and the choreography of the dances.

While it’s definitely something that could only be done as a one-off concept episode, I had a blast with it. Enough of a blast that when I found out that the soundtrack is on iTMS, it was downloading to my computer just a few moments later. My favorite track from the show? Definitely Spike’s showcase number, Rest in Peace. Not only does it do a wonderful job of expressing Spike’s frustration in his non-relationship with Buffy, but it’s a fun power rock pseudo-ballad, and James Marsters does a credible job with it (even if his accent does slip a bit from time to time).

While ‘Hush’ still takes the prize as my all-time favorite episode that I’ve seen so far, ‘Once More With Feeling’ is a very, very close second. If only there were more television shows like this, I might actually bother to watch TV more often.

iTunes “Main Title (from ”Once More with Feeling“)” by Orchestra from the album Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Once More, With Feeling (2002, 0:27).