sparkrobot

I witnessed the psychedelic sonic assault from Voyager One and visuals by Projectorhead on Saturday night. Awesome, underlined.

Analog projectionist extraordinaire, projectorhead.

Here are some photos of Sloan from the performance at Chop Suey two weeks ago.

The Golden Dogs from Toronto, Canada opened for Sloan at Chop Suey. They put on an engaging and energetic set of indie rock by the numbers. Without further ado, some photos of The Golden Dogs live at Chop Suey Sunday night.

Last week I met up with an old friend from Tucson whom I didn’t realize has lived up here in Seattle for four years. We reconnected by virtue of the unyielding and strangely magical power of the series of tubes. We decided to meet up and we head over to Cafe Venus to grab something to eat and a couple of beers.

Though there are typically live shows Thursday-Saturday at the Venus counterpart, Mars Bar, I was surprised to learn The Ruby Suns were playing later that Wednesday night. I walked home to grab my camera and headed back to the place.

Though I had picked up one their Sea Lion release early this year on a recommendation, this was my first chance to see the band live. They performed a short, lively and interesting set; a mix of triggered loops and samples, cocktail drums and live instrumentation. I actually ran into Ryan McPhun last night at the Sloan show (which I’ll post photos from soon) at Chop Suey and spoke with him briefly. He mentioned circa 1999, Sloan was one of his favorite bands at the time. Enough of my rambling, here are the resulting photographs from The Ruby Suns’ performance, in case you didn’t click on the giant photo atop this post.

From one of the darkest rooms I’ve ever taken pictures in without a flash, come some of the grainiest pictures. Tacoma band Mono in VCF playing live at the Lo-Fi Performance Gallery last Saturday night in Seattle. Mono in VCF photo gallery.

From the Breeder’s digital newsletter disseminator, a note on All Wave Recording Philosophy:

The “All Wave” philosophy, which loosely stated, is that everything should be an analog sound recording of someone playing or singing, rather than using a computer to generate or digitally manipulate sounds separated from the dimension of time in which they were performed.

Okay. And newsletters should be cut and pasted together by hand using xacto knives, tape and over-caffeinated all night copy shop xerox sessions and solely distributed via pony express. Or maybe simply telegraphy will suffice.

I like records. And I like analog stuff. Although admittedly, I did not know music should not be made unless it can be created using technology innovated decades ago.

The note concludes with a quote from Steve Albini:

This should not be construed as a call to arms, but could become at least as significant as the Ska revival or perhaps the WNBA.

Touche.

Aqueduct played a great set outdoors at the South Lake Union Block Party this year. Who want to rock with the Aqueduct? There’s a new Aqueduct photo gallery online. The photos just posted, but already one has become the Three Imaginary Girls photo of the day. Cheers TIG!

A friend of mine Rudy plays drums for Bugs in Amber. Here is a gallery of their set at the 2008 South Lake Union Block Party.