Monday, February 27, 2006

the Coach and Horses



Saturday, February 25, 2006 in Windsor, Ontario Canada
at the Coach and Horses with NOT_digital

This was our first trip to Canada since our gig in Montreal, and although a much shorter drive, border issues were still a concern. Luckily, on the way in, they just waved us through, which allowed a great sigh of relief, at least we could stay on schedule for the evening. Our first stop was the CJAM studio to do a radio interview with Pete Kopcheck for his Mind Over Acid show. The local band hosting our show that evening, NOT_digital, was there as well, a couple of friendly guys that much reminded me of people i'm happy to know well. Although Pete insisted he won top prize for "worst interviewer ever", as I say we're always impressed to do an interview where we don't have to pull the mic out of a seat cushion, and he did a fine job as well. Hopefully the recording will be up in their archives at: http://www.cjam.ca

We had an hour to kill between the interview and soundcheck, so we headed downtown. It was a cold and blistery evening, dark already at 7pm, and those that know Windsor know it's infamous for the influx of college students flooding across the border to drink legally a few years early, so there was very limited parking. We stopped a ways off from our venue and started wandering, and I was a little freaked out to find my face staring back at me from nearly every store window within a 4 block radius..the NOT_digital guys had done an exceptional job of postering the city with the flyer for our show. We stopped in one of Windsor's fine establishments for a little ambience and tourism entertainment before heading back to Coach and Horses where NOT_digital greeted us and we unloaded our equipment.

I've always liked the Coach and Horses, it's a really old venue, and the basement used to be a classic pub from way back with lanterns and brick and fireplaces and all, so it sets a great mood for an intimate show. It was however pretty much a do-it-yourself venture as far as sound, we learned that one member of NOT_digital worked in a printing shop (hence all the posters) and the other worked in a music store, providing the needed sound equipment for the show, so they were our sound guys and we played it by ear. Luckily, we brought plenty of lights along as well and shared them with the opening act to get things rolling. We had our merch table pretty near the stage, so I was glad to have nearly front-row seats to NOT_digital's performance, mostly down-tempo industrial-influenced trip-hop, really ambient with neat noises. I was pretty geeked out they had one of those midi guitars plugged into an MS2000, which was awesome to see in action. They also did a cover of Genesis's "Land of Confusion" which rocked, i was singing along and had lots of fun with that.

It was nearly 1am when we played, and still a good crowd remained, I was impressed also with the number of people that had shown up even before 10pm to hear us and stayed to the very end of the night. Dedicated fans! :) Aside from some expected sound issues, I really enjoyed performing that evening..I finally did Prefrontal live, which was pretty intense to do all that screaming, then head back for a softly melodic track afterwards, but it worked out great. I also did the Detroit (my) remix of "Seed" from my sideproject with Louis Diaz of TL5 called BioMod, so that meant a lot to me as well. We had some good friends show up for the show, which made the night all the more enjoyable, one had an HD-video camera with him too, so hopefully we'll get some footage to show you! Thanks to everyone who came out, I hope you had a blast :)

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