Smog/Toulouse/OSOE/
It seems like the month of august will allow us some time to slow down. This is a combination of our last half of the week. Starting on thursthurs, with Smog(band) @ the empty bottle. What a great night. The openers Feathers were really amazing, folkyfolky music. Each member played almost any instrument and they all harmonized really well with each other. Then Smog came on and blew me away. He had a second guitarist with him who added a bit of a country blues vibe to the songs. He played most of A River Ain’t to Much to Love with some old favorites thrown in.
Saturday it was a bike ride down to the Art Institute to the see Toulouse-Lautrec & Montmartre exhibition. Being members (thanks to Kristie’s parents) we get a couple of free tickets and so decided what a great way to spend the saturday. The exhibition is quite large and seems to cover most of the art taking place in Montmartre in the late 1800’s. Even though its billed as a Toulouse-Lautrec show there are just as many paintings by his contemporaries to show the cross-influences and overall creative atmosphere that was happening. I would have liked to to be less crowded but it was a saturday of beautiful weather. The rest of the day was punctuated looking for something to eat (since lo cal local has now been bought out and will be turned condo’s) and record shopping. To close the day it was another performance at Mess Hall, this time dubbed MF vs PSR vs YAHMAHA. I enjoyed this even more thimprov improv roulette the other night. We got there a bit late and walked in on the PSR set which was amazing. Cello played through a delay/looper and 2 keyboards that fed into another loop device with a 4th person on drum machine/sampler. It was really textual and dark, while the cello would add melody to the rumblings of the very affected keyboards. There was a lot going on. MF was a guy who performs by the name Mr Fuckhead and plays a yahmaha keyboard where he tweeked the notes until they were unrecognizable. After his 2 “performances” (which were really just all of us watching his programer run since he had pre programed it so all he had to do was hit go) there was a large group session which went on for about 30 minutes. Very inspiring performances all around. I worked on something sunday morning based on some of the ideas talked about by most of them that night.
Sunday was low-key, as it should be. Brunch at Le Creperie and then some bumming around the Belmont area while kirstie took pictures. On the way to unlock the bikes I get a call from my brother who informs me that he is engaged. I am not totally surprised, he has been going with the same girl for about 4 years and they seem happy together. Besides that nothing new going on.