Had a nice gig at the famous avantgarde nest of Ravintola Kirja in Helsinki. I've never heard Vuk live, and the performance of the band and Vuk's vocal virtuosity was supperb. The evening was brought to end with Larkin Grimm's bound to earth folk-orientated music with some nice singing, allthough I didn't witness the whole gig for practical reasons.
For Markku Lahtelan Sirkus the evening was fun improing through agreed structures, allthough the monitoring and lack of proper soundcheck disturbed a bit (in some parts of our performance I had to operate with vision since I could't hear what I was playing), but these are just basic flaws which make the gig more challenging.
The whole repertory of our show was new, and rehearsed in two days (except the acoustic song with Djembe, guitar and saxofone) which made the evening a bit more interesting, since there is no guarantee how the music (and noises) sound to the audience. Still had some new chaotic sounds out from the 4-track recorder (plugged together with guitar) and Mikko's lap top gave some interesting bonus-sounds while it almost went down! I think it really served the purpose. I also did some vocal improvisation in a semi-choral piece (put together by 4-track, hammond, and computer-revised singing).
There has been always an unspoken idea in the live acts of MLS, since the stuff we put together (with unlimited possibilities) in studio is rather a different thing than hearing the band live. So there is this impossible drive to do everything to "keep the patient alive", since we run from instrument to the another, trying to create multible sounds, but also at the same time as minimal as possible, since there is always the arrangement side to think of, because we don't want to sound like a plain noise band. And what I like about those performances, is that even though somewhere always lurks the possibility of everything falling appart, the continuing "putting your self out there" while impovising, and the hectic threat of everything turning into chaos, ie. the danger of the whole shit not working, seems to keep it all together.
Allthough this sounds like another "controlled chaos" cliché in music, I think it's not, since we've always had the greatest responisibility of putting the humpty dumty back together again. Which, I dare to say, with all remarks of compromises done to put the band on stage, creates something new, makes it pretty original.

More later.. off to enjoy the crispy "morning".


-T