Brutum Fulmen & Hrvatski
Live: October 6, 2000
Zeitgeist Gallery, Cambridge, MA
For your listening pleasure I've uploaded an mp3 of part of the show, along with a live solo improv in my basement from the days leading up to it. This practice session was released in 2004 on the New England 5LP RRRecords box set.
Blog: October 9, 2000
[Below is an entry from the Brutum Fulmen blog shortly after the show.]
I've finally recovered from the Friday night show at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge MA. Well, mainly it was the late night that did me in. Hrvatski went on at 8pm with his laptop-based ambient/experimental/noise/sound act. We probably went on around 9, ended probably close to 10, then went out for ice cream afterward with Howard and Seth who'd arranged the show. Ken and I finally got back to my place around 3am and went to bed around 5am.
Personally, I don't want to do a laptop based show for a few reasons, but I can certainly see a number of benefits. All Hrvatski had to do was close his laptop, and put away his little computer speakers. Nice and easy for setting up and breaking down, and great for travel. You can even record your show directly to the hard drive as you play. I won't even get into issues of flexibility of the tools.
But this night the Brutum Fulmen had: two large main speakers (15" woofers, heavy duty construction), two tall living-room style secondary speakers, a home-stereo receiver component, an old turntable/radio/receiver combined thing, a walkman, a pile of guitar effects pedals, a reverb rack effect, a few mics, a half-broken four-track deck just for mixing our sound, a large metal shelving cabinet for scraping and banging, a small metal radiator, a couple of big power supplies, and a few various odds and ends. All connected with a tangled snake nest of patch cords and adaptors. It all barely fit into my Oldsmobile 88 (a big old boat). It did help that this time we put numbered stickers on everything to indicate how it all connected, but it's still a chore.
Anyway, the show seemed to be fairly well received judging by the number of CDs we sold. I mean, people will clap no matter how bad your show is, but I figure they aren't gonna buy discs if you suck. We did have a little electrical problem; namely, me kicking out the plugs. Ken also had some trouble with the Dio tape he pulled out of the cassette for playing on his disassembled walkman -- it seems there were large sections of silent tape at the ends. And I forgot to turn on the DAT deck that was recording the show until about 6 minutes in. And the video tape I put in the camcorder was about 10 minutes from the END, not 10 minutes from the BEGINNING as I'd thought.
With this level of competence, it's amazing I've survived this long. In any case, I will try to extract something from the DAT and post it here this week. Maybe a video capture or two as well.
One odd thing was that I met a disproportionately large number of people from my alma mater (which has to be at least 4 hours away), including a professor of computer music and IT who also urged me to begin using a computer in the show.
Thanks to everyone who showed up at the Zeitgeist!
Review
Review by Boston area prog rocker, Bill Dennison.
