but it's my recording of a good friend of mine performing a short opening set at a friend's apartment in the Mission. he is a one-man show. one man, one guitar, one amp, and many, many pedals. with these devices on his side, he leads us on an epically dark journey through sonic seas and beating bloodbaths.
as you'll hear, chris starts the show with a reading of a passage from The Old Man and the Sea. around 6min in, you can barely hear him read a short passage from Blood Meridian. he continues through this back and forth of readings, but each time the wall of sound rises higher above his voice, drowning out any possibility of intelligibility. is this how either Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy is meant to be read?
note: i've included about two minutes of what one might call superfluous recording, where people talk, sit around, and wait anxiously for the performance to begin. except i don't consider it superfluous. a live performance is an organic experience. that's why it's called a LIVE performance. when you go see an orchestra perform a symphony, they do not merely start at the first note of the piece. no, long before you hear that first note, you hear thousands of notes emanating from every instrument in the orchestra, as the virtuosos tune their weapons. not only that, but as it is here, you hear the quacking of human conversation from every side.
enjoy.
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