Our second gig at the Time Out was slightly hampered by bad weather… It was raining mightily as we loaded out of our little practice studio, and the drive up to Concord was pretty much stop-and-go nearly half the way. We still arrived with plenty of time for set-up and a relaxed sound-check, which of course is never a bad thing. The set went of fairly well… little rough round the edges, perhaps. No songs were skipped due to samples misleading (Glabyglob actually made it into the show this time) though we did have to drop the last song due to time constraints. Funny how when they say “You guys get a set of 40-45 minutes” they always mean 40. Why not say, “You guys get a 40 minute set” and be done with it? Quotation of the evening: When I asked the audience which song they wanted to hear as our last one for the evening, Bad Mind or Accidental LoFi, an anonymous voice shouted out: “Which ever one’s longer!”. Thanks! Check out the video clip here.

Set List:
Intercepted Entropy
Jack Palance the Ninja
Ghost Curve
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven Penetration Program
Glabyglop (made it this time!)
Botched Civillian
Severe Annoyance
Accidental LoFi

Live practice tonight. Live as in "not listening through headphones or in-ears" as we have been the last couple weeks. Its good to be loud now and again. The jacks on my Ground Control are still jacked... but holding them together with a velcro strap seemed to serve as a workaround. For now at least.

The meeting is on. And just like our favorite contestants on American Idol... we're going to LA. We have a couple weeks still before we meet with these filmmakers, but if all goes well... this could be very, very cool. At the very least we'll have a fun time meeting. We'll let you know how things pan out.

Decent practice this afternoon – we’re sticking with pretty much the same set for the next Time Out gig… only this time we’ll try not to overlook The Glabyglop this time. Of course now the expression pedal jacks on my Ground Control are acting up, so we had to take it apart and see if the connections were broken. They weren’t, but the jacks are tweaked nonetheless, so I suppose I’ll have to program some workarounds for the time being.

RoboDump. In other News, looks like MI will be included in this years LMS (Loud Music Symposium) in April. More details when they are available.

Ah... looks like this week is pretty much shot (no thanks to a little food incident for Mark - we'll spare you the details). Just have to practice twice as hard next week. Looks like we're not trying to set up a meeting with those filmmakers down in LA (thanks again to Lee at Broken Ocean) And now back to American Idol (Ouch. This is beyond painful). Off you go.

Started the process of clearing off my music computer and backing up all the files associated with the recording of ideas and demos over the past couple of years… making room for the real recordings, you know. Somewhere around 11GB or something like that. What a mess. Now if only I can get that stuff archived to DVD-Rs before another fire-wire drive crashes...

Just got word from Lee at Broken Ocean that he's pitched Maximum Indifference to a film production company to do the soundtrack for an upcoming movie. If it works… well, that would be pretty darn cool. But that's about all the details I have right now. We'll let you know more when we know more.

We played our first gig at the Pine Street Bar and Grill in Livermore last night… everything turned out pretty well. The threatening skies did not release their rains until after we had loaded in –so that was a relief. We arrived early with plenty of time to set up and, of course, we used every last available minute. Rich was running his new mixing setup, where he brought his own mics and mic’d up his kit himself… the idea being that we’d just send a stereo feed of the drums to the house. Simple enough, right? Well, we had things pretty much in hand and under control… until the sound guy showed up. I suppose because we were doing things differently that what he was used to it took a little longer to get to the point where we could do a sound check. Ultimately, everything worked out just fine, and the reports from the house were that things sounded great. Performance-wise, things felt pretty good too. Aside from the fact that the samples for Glabyglop were mysteriously absent from the sampler banks (actually… it never got loaded for some reason) everything else came together. We debuted Severe Annoyance… which didn’t really seem to annoy anybody. Hmmm. Have to try harder next time, I suppose. Anyway, if you missed out on the action, take a peek at a little video clip here.

Set List:
Accidental LoFi
Jack Palance the Ninja
Ghost Curve
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven Penetration Program
Glabyglop(doh!)
Botched Civillian
Severe Annoyance (New)
Accidental LoFi
Bad Mind

Last stop before the gig tomorrow... a nice little 3 and a half hour practice to round out the week. Only at first it wasn't really nice—lots of little technical gremlins running amuck. Once we stamped those little suckers out (mostly, kind of?) we were able to get a decent run at the set.

Another lunch time practice today... putting some finishing touches on the newest song we'll be including in Saturday's set (got the samples worked out for Severe Annoyance). We seem to be getting some pretty decent takes of some of this stuff down on tape - so who knows... In other matters, I would say if you're not interested in having a rat-shake just change the channel!

Happy New Year! We're back in the swing of things now that those pesky holidays are behind us. Okay, not really pesky, but they're behind us nonetheless. We've got a little more set time to play with than our last show, so we're going to try to squeeze in yet another new tune. "Severe Annoyance" will be likely be making its debut at the Pine Street gig (provided I can get the samples mapped in time). We're be trying some new stuff drum-wise, as well - as Rich has now taken to micing his entire kit himself and submixing the whole thing before it goes to the house PA... Which will either make things a whole lot simpler, or a whole lot more complex. We'll have to wait and see.