10 Years of OCSC

Trish Mesigian and her fabulous bar the Orange County Social Club recently celebrated 10 years of existence with a series of shows in the bar itself and at the Cats Cradle down the street. I played a solo set, there's a clip of me doing "Rope Light" HERE in the dim light of the bar.

The set was thematic-ish:

Getting Older (the Clean
Outside This Bar (American Music Club)
Hey Salty
Rope Light
Music Lovers (Destroyer)
Lets Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits (Magnetic Fields)
4th of July Asbury Park (Springsteen)
I Don't Want To Go Home (Southside Johnny)
Autumn Got Dark
Punch Me Harder
Swinging Doors (Merle Haggard)
Song for A Clock
Digging for Something

Lots of great shows the whole week, capped by Seven Brides for the Meatwagon doing their famous slew of covers good and bad.

Thanks Trish & everyone who works at OCSC!

Transfigured Time at Westobou Festival

My first visit to Augusta (though i met someone at the Superchunk Atlanta show who was convinced we had played there 20 years ago; as far as i know we did not!) was a good one. The Westobou Festival is run by people who are genuinely enthusiastic about art and bringing it to their town, and the venue we played, Sacred Heart Cultural Center, was kind of insane. Built in 1898, fallen into disuse and de-sanctified by the late 80s, nearly destroyed but saved by a wealthy patron, it's a fairly stunning and great-sounding place to play music / see a performance. Our performance in particular went well, nerves and all considering it was our first live performance of the music.

We paired one new piece with each of the four Maya Deren films shown -- Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, The Very Eye of Night, and Ritual in Transfigured Time. Having done it once now, there are some arrangements that i'd like to tweak and flesh out further, so hopefully we'll get to play this music again in the future...

Thanks to Kristen Beard, Seamus Kenney, Brian Paulson, Mark Simonsen, and Matt Vooris for playing, as well as Carl Purdy and Angela Rubendall, Augusta musicians who joined us on violin.

We unfortunately had no time for any James Brown landmark-seeing, mainly because we were busy getting lost in the winding hallways of the haunted inn we stayed at. Next time!