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If I go to a show and there is one opening act, I’m in heaven. If there are two opening acts then I’m ok. If there are three opening acts then you might lose my attention and if, for whatever reason, there are four opening acts I am probably pissed. If two of those four acts are considered “experimental” then you can color me bored.

On Friday night, this happened. The first band to play was Parenthetical Girls. Oddly enough, they were my favorite act of the night. I wish they had been allowed a longer set.

After that was Grouper (aka Liz Harris) who performed with a guy named Ilyas Ahmed. In all honesty, since it was so early in the evening, I enjoyed it. Soothing guitar soundscapes is something I can get behind.

Following Grouper was Dirty Projectors which was enjoyable, quirky pop music. Some cool male/female vocal harmonies going on.

After Dirty Projectors was Congs For Brums, which is a solo thing the drummer for Xiu Xiu does involving drums and xylophone. At this point, I’d been at the concert for three hours and his performance lasted for about forty minutes. A man can only take so much drumming and xylophoning before he just doesn’t care.

So Xiu Xiu finally went on at about 11:30 (an hour and a half after they were scheduled) and they did their thing. Played some songs, rocked some bodies. Jamie Stewart did some breakdancing. Ok, no he didn’t.

For all of the sets I had a soundboard feed (which I’ve never been able to get at this venue before). Turns out, it’s not worth the hassle to begin with. First off, they run the PA in mono so I was only given one XLR cable. Second, they must not know how to mix the drums at all because they clip the entire time. At first I thought it was my fault for not bumping down the gain on my JB3 but then I realized that the signal itself was clipping, not my recording. I looked at the waveform in Audition and it peaks at about -6db, but is a constant brickwall. So, basically, the soundguy sent me a signal that is blown out and there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn’t too bad on the Parenthetical Girls set or the Congs For Brums sets so I used those. The other ones were pretty much useless, though.

Parenthetical Girls – 2006-11-03 Paradox Theatre – Seattle, WA
Download: pg2006-11-03.akgc1000s.matrix.flac16.zip
MP3 Sample: pg2006 -11-03sample.mp3

Grouper w/ Ilyas Ahmed – 2006-11-03 Paradox Theatre – Seattle, WA
Download: grouper2006-11-03.akgc1000s.flac16.zip
MP3 Sample: grouper2006-11-03sample.mp3

Dirty Projectors – 2006-11-03 Paradox Theatre – Seattle, WA
Download: dp2006-11-03.akgc1000s.flac16.zip
MP3 Sample: dp2006-11-03sample.mp3

Congs For Brums – 2006-11-03 Paradox Theatre – Seattle, WA
Download: cfb2006-11-03.soundboard.flac16.zip
MP3 Sample: cfb2006-11-03sample.mp3

Xiu Xiu – 2006-11-03 Paradox Theatre – Seattle, WA
Download: xiuxiu2006-11-03.akgc1000s.flac16.zip
MP3 Sample: xiuxiu2006-11-03sample.mp3

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 4:12 PM and is filed under Main, Taping.