Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

arcati crisis

How is it that we made it out to be so hard?

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IMG_3071Earlier this evening Gina and I spent some time watching a DVD of a performance of ours from 2004.

The experience was at once reassuring and horrific. Horrific because of the sheer terror of some of the choices we made on dynamics and harmony. Reassuring because the core of what we were doing four years ago – the good part – is identical to what we’ve been doing for the past thirteen months.

Bands, unfortunately, don’t come with an instruction book. Luckily, Gina and I are unshakeable friends with the same ridiculous sense of humor, so the interpersonal part hasn’t been difficult, and any stumbling blocks have been handled with aplomb. But, it’s taken a lot of trying to figure out how to run an effective rehearsal, or how to approach learning a new song, or how to salvage a floundering set, amongst a myriad of other difficulties.

(For the record, the former includes eating dinner first, and the second involves having multiple copies of printed lyrics on which we make constant, extensive notation in pencil. We haven’t completely figured out the third, but so far it would seem to involve playing “Pocahontas,” multiple times if necessary.)

I feel as though now that we’re in our second year of formal existence the training wheels on our band are slowly starting to disengage. Clearly we know how to write lead sheets and arrange harmony, or else we wouldn’t have made it this far with a pretty solid 16-song set. However, 2008 is already bringing more advanced trials – like booking our own gigs, and adding additional members to the ensemble.

We’re two unusual people, and we make an unusual pair of singer-songwriters. We sing an unusual collection of tunes ranging from unrequited longing to ruminations on the apocalypse, from vitriolic blasts to paeans to a semi-fictional communist outpost in Idaho. Neither of us knows a damn thing about what we’re doing, and we’re having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

If there was an instruction book I’m not sure I’d read any of it.

(if you’re reading this on a feed, visit CK to hear the audio)
(also, be our friend)

More Than I Am; Less Like Me

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Around this time in last year’s NaBloPoMo Gina and I were just convening for our yearly holiday revue rehearsals, which wound up evolving into full-time Arcati Crisis.

Back then we would break off a set early if our mixing was bad or we biffed a harmony, and we didn’t like playing with other people because it threw off our very precarious musical balance.

Tonight we played three songs with a backing band in front of a modest crowd, rocking two of them quite adequately, and soldiering through a third one despite highly audible technical issues arising from our back line.

Our mixing was middling; no harmony was biffed.

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After our set we mingled with various artists up in the (awesome) balcony-level green room, and witnessed a stunning percussion jam lead by our dear friend Dante Bucci and including our new favorite tabla player on the entire planet, Natasha.

Whilst we were relaxing between sets we struck up a conversation with the other performers. I’m always a little fearful of these backstage relationships, because I find them impossible to maintain with tact and grace if I decide that the performer is not up to par (and I’m afraid they’ll have the same issue with me).

One woman in particular was very charming, and we spoke to her at length about our history, how long we’ve known each other and have been playing together, and how satisfying it is to finally be a real band playing music together.

When we asked her about herself she mostly demurred, saying that she had given up writing songs for a while but recently fell back into it. That just made me all the more anxious about the prospects of carrying on a conversation afterward she played, but I put it aside; we were talking to a such a perceptive and personable fellow musician, and I should enjoy that completely apart from her actual musicianship.

As it turns out, she was amazing. Her songs were campy in an intentional, hilarious, genuine way, and her piano playing and singing were both unassailable and sometimes remarkable. Later she complained about a flubbed chord, and Gina and I remarked truthfully that we wouldn’t have ever known had she not told us.

(I need to remember that the same usually holds true for us.)

Nancy Huebner. Keep your ear out.

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The moral of those dual stories is one and the same.

If you have something in your life that you’ve always wanted to do – something that you love (or think you would love doing) but never thought you would be good at – do it.

Stop asking questions. Don’t ask questions. Don’t doubt. Equip yourself with knowledge and enthusiasm, work at it until the work becomes effortless and fun, and then have fun doing it in the absence of the approval of anyone other than yourself.

Eventually it won’t matter if your harmony gets biffed or your chord gets flubbed every once and a while, because what you’re doing will be about a lot more than harmony and chords.

It’ll be about happiness.

The road flows like a river, and pulls me around every bend.

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I think that was a sufficient amount of time to bask, uninterrupted, in being a fiancé.

Much stuff is afoot in chez krisis, and not just our impending wedding. I have more to say on that topic than you could ever hope to consume in a single sitting, so I’ll be dragging the whole mess of it through National Blog Posting month, and beyond.

Okay, I’ll say one thing now: I love all the dire wedding warnings that come from every quarter when you first get engaged. I suppose it’s a cultural hazing thing? I just don’t get it. Each of our favorite weddings were relatively lacking in insanity and drama according to the various brides. Also, we’re both OCD project managers with the same taste in everything.

Right. Remind me to come back and read this post in about twelve months and see what I have to say about it.

If that was all that was happening it would be, oh, say, the most exciting time of my entire life. However, chattery on the topic of engagedness tends to eclipse the fact that there are also some other life events in motion, such as the massive behemoth of posts that is NaBloPoMo looming a mere two days away.

You should be comforted to know that I’ve drawn up a comprehensive content grid so I’m never lacking for post topic (see, OCD project managers). The challenge will be finding myself awake and at a computer long enough to do any posting.

Part of that challenge is that Gina and I (AKA Arcati Crisis) are playing a second trio of songs with a rhythm section on November 9th at the Rotunda, followed by multiple holiday performances, and moving through a half-hour set at Doc Watson’s in January (and, possibly another appearance at the Tin Angel), all of which results in plenty of rehearsals, both together and separately.

Oh, and the normal busyness, such as having four of my projects reviewed (and approved!) by our CEO over the last month, learning various exercises and arias for my weekly voice lessons, working up a communications plan for our homegrown music festival, and trying to drag my sorry ass out to East Falls every Thursday to play our favorite open mic.

And, last but certainly not least (though, what could really be least in this list?), I suddenly – and completely out of the blue, I assure you – can play piano. I’m still slow to learn actual pop songs, but I seem to have collected a modest enough palette of rhythms and riffs that I can bang through my own stuff with increasing ease and surprising variation, and I actually prefer some of it on keys to guitar strings. Imagine that!

Anyhow, that’s life, at the moment – full of activity, but paradoxically forcing me to take frequent naps in order to keep up with it.

How have you been?

Illuminated Pickups, et cetera

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(1) Elise bought me a gift certificate for a pickup replacement on my primary electric guitar as a birthday gift, which is perfect timing, as Gina and I were already plotting on evolving Arcati Crisis into the electric realm over the course of the next few months.

My guitar is an Epiphone copy of a Gibson 335, and after several years of playing it and digesting online reviews it would seem that the only non-esoteric detail separating my guitar from the equivalent Gibson is the style/tone of the pickups (and also the nut).

My original birthday gift plan was to outfit my guitar exactly like a brand-new 335 – with two Gibson 57 Classic humbuckers. However, at Arcati Crisis’s Tin Angel gig I got into a conversation with our friend Chris about the possibility of buying two different types of pickups so my neck tone is differentiated from bridge.

And, um, I am not quite rock enough to know anything else about this life-altering decision.

I spent a few days researching my various indie-rock heroes, but none of them has a distinct enough setup for me to emulate. Also, I can’t turn up anything on the guitar rig of Garbage ax-slinger Duke Erickson (he being ostensibly the reason I bought this particular guitar in the first place). However, I did locate the eminently informative Guitar Player Gear Guide blog.

Do any of you wonderful people know anything about this? I have to drop my guitar off at the store on Saturday if I have any hope of getting it back before the next Arcati Crisis gig.

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(2) I want a WordPress plugin that will insert illustrated initial letters into my posts, both automatically and on-demand. Bonus points if they are illuminated.

I know enough PHP to be a minor threat when it comes to WordPress, but this particular concept is out of my realm because it involves live rejiggering of text as its being called out of the ether of my database.

Anyone?

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(3a) After an inexplicable one week delay the new PJ Harvey disc, White Chalk, came out yesterday. It’s been billed as PJ’s piano album, but that only tells a fraction of the story. It’s really more like her indie, piano-based, acoustic, English-Appalachian folk record. Sort of. Full review forthcoming.

(3b) Also inexplicable: Bruce Springsteen‘s lead single (“Radio Nowhere“) is one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard in months, and the production is all tight and sparkly and curiously “Since U Been Gone” sounding.

A quick sample spin through the rest of his newly released Magic yields similar results on at least three others songs, leading me to (for the first time ever) want to buy a Bruce Springsteen CD in a bad way. But, then I’m like, dude, you so do not like Bruce in any way, shape, or form. In my youth he was relegated to my mother’s forbidden trinity of vocal idiosyncrasies – Bruce, Bob, and Neil.

Even having disposed of a few of those systematically programmed prejudices (e.g., I do not ridiculously eschew middle Beatles) I can’t seem to succumb to the Magic of Asbury Park’s favorite son. I even tried paying for a copy with Elise’s credit card to try to alleviate some of the hard-coded guilt, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it.

Maybe if i just buy it track by track from iTunes I can avoid any imperative towards self-immolation my mother may have embedded in my unconscious psyche in my infancy through a series of flash cards.

(3c) OMG, I forgot to mention the best part of last week’s happy (six) hour(s): Melon is going to go to the Kelly Clarkson concert with me. Oh yessss.

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(End Note) Not only does me + Gina = awesome rock stars, but as of a few minutes ago I completed the first draft of a standard notation transcription of one of our songs, complete with guitar tabs and harmony.

I cannot express to you the undue amount of excitement this is causing me, a major sheet music fetishist.

Sheet music! Of our song! Necessary because we forgot how to play it!

(Or, more accurately, because we recorded it in one night for SongFight, so it never really existed as a song that we could play together in a physical space (though I believe we once attempted it at a Lyndzapalooza).)

Alright, enough chatter.