Live music in SF/Oakland, and maybe elsewhere...
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Without their normal singer, who was out with a cold....
01 Teenage Kicks [The Undertones][2:54]
02 'the dog ate our lead singer'[1:44]
03 Everybody's Happy Now [Buzzcocks][4:05]
04 Part Time Punks [Television Personalities] [3:19]
Total 12:02
I procured the video for "Everybody's Happy Now", which was online and synced it up with my audio as the original capture (from Lyndsey Parker) was distorted....
Bonus: Live footage from The Nightengales, also from Lyndsey Parker.
As well as Love Is All...too bad the audio is distorted....
As finally, Mika Miko....this time from David (bossharmony) Orlando. This is frankly brilliant (maybe the best 23 seconds you'll ever spend watching something on YouTube)....I'm bummed that I somehow missed their performance, again, probably got there too late....
I traveled all the way down from SF to catch A Certain Ratio, which to date has not come back to the West Coast, so glad that I did. What's remarkable isn't who I saw but who I didn't see. Namely: The Nightingales, Nervous Gender, Vivian Girls, Mika Miko, Warpaint, The Urinals, Magic Bullets (who I did catch a few times the following year) and Ben White (otherwise known as Benny Shambles) Softboiled Eggies, nor do I remember any of the DJs...and only saw the encore track (M-Train) from Pylon. Luckily I caught them in SF a few days later, their penultimate performance before guitarist Randy Bewley sadly and suddenly passed away.
The good news though is that I missed Ariel Pink, that I do not regret!
First up, Grimble Grumble. I came in midway through their set and only captured several songs (forst two unidentified), the last being a cover of "Here Come The Warm Jets" by Brian Eno, and then outro music of the Chills' amazing 'Pink Frost'.
And then, Wild Stares. When researching this, I learned that they just released an album last October ("Automatic Writing Machine"), based on an album they started working on this very show. It's actually excellent.
Video of full set from Bottom Of The Hill, Feb 2008 (Paste Magazine)
All recorded by thehappyone using Sonic Studios DSM-6 mics plugged into an Edirol R-09HR. These have not been shared widely before.
Minipop
band intro (2:02) intro piece (2:17)
Monsters (4:27)
Ask Me A Question (3:42)
Generator (3:53)
Like I Do (3:45)
Let Go (3:24)
Stars (5:08)
Black Metallic [Catherine Wheel] (6:37)
The Way You Are (4:43)
10 tracks, 39:58
Excellent band fronted by Tricia Kanne (vox/keyboard/guitar), with Matthew Swanson (keys/guitar), Nick Forte (bass), Ross Grant (guitars), and Lauren Grubb (drums). Lauren would later pound the skins for a bit for Topographies. "Like I Do" is as terrific now as it was then.
Normally, I don't redo my FLACs for such old shows, but I noticed that the original set had final track "The Way You Are" cut at the 3:22 point. I checked my original master WAVs and that was complete, so I went ahead and grafted the last minute or so from that onto the file, and while I was at it, I cleaned up some of the handling noise (decrackle filter plus channel cloning on the high frequencies), limited some of the loud clapping and whooping (mostly from yours truly), and applied automatic phase correction.
Essentially a project Michael Sempert and cohorts were doing for a few years. Quite sophisticated synth pop.
This recording isn't ideal, due to some handling noise that sounds like a strap being fastened/unfastened and a chattery crowd, and it sounds like the right mic wasn't aligned properly. A couple of unreleased tracks appear on this.
Bonus video, this is The Botticellis playing acoustically as featured on The Mercury Sessions, which was a very short-lived music feature set done by the SJ-based newspaper. They only did five total.
To quote from the posting...
From San Francisco's Outer Richmond district, the Botticellis love to make delicate pop music and love to surf. Members Burton Li, Blythe Foster and Alexi Glickman swung by on April 25, 2008, to chat with San Jose Mercury News music writer Shay Quillen and perform "Flashlight" and "Up Against the Glass" from their debut CD, plus the previously unreleased "Lucy Lucia."
I remember very little from this show, unfortunately.
Wow, my quip after "Under Chandeliers" was pretty off-color this or any other time of month. She mentioned at the end that she didn't bring any CDs, so couldn't buy anything to help support her.
On Discogs, her 2005 "Whisky Was The Medicine" can be viewed as a release from 'Paige(12)'. I bought one of the two copies for sale. That will allow me to better flesh out the entry on the site which among other things is missing artwork.
2008's "Under Chandeliers" has no such entry. I will remedy that once my CD arrives.
Paige is not on Bandcamp, at least for her solo efforts. In fact, the link to the Studio One Reading Series is the only information about her that I could find.
Stereolab 2008-10-21 The Fillmore San Francisco CA
taper: lammah equipment: Sonic Studios DSM-6Ls > Sonic Studios PA-6 bat box > Edirol R-09HR (24 bit/48khZ) > Adobe Audition (decrackle; normalize) > FLAC24 (6)
Tracklist:
00 - intro [1:21] 01 - Percolator [3:36] 02 - Neon Beanbag [5:03] 03 - Eye Of The Volcano [4:23] 04 - Mountain [3:19] 05 - Chemical Chords [5:25] 06 - Two Finger Symphony [3:18] 07 - Ping Pong [3:09] 08 - Valley Hi! [3:45] 09 - Lo Boob Oscillator [8:19] 10 - The Ecstatic Static [5:49] 11 - Double Rocker [5:21] 12 - Silver Sands [3:40] 13 - John Cage Bubblegum [2:56] 14 - French Disko [3:24] 15 - Cybele's Reverie [5:32] 16 - pre-encore break [1:45] 17 - Vortical [3:29] (introduced as a new song) 18 - The Emergency Kisses [5:29] 19 - Stomach Worm [12:30]
Total [91:35]
2008-era notes:
My first outing with my new Edirol recorder, and as you're about to hear, the results were very good, but again, there was some crackle which I had to use Adobe Audition's pop/click removal to eradicate, though you'd be hard-pressed to hear any of it. I'm wondering if the PA6 I have is malfunctioning (or if the battery powering it was simply dead), next gig I think I'll try to go without it.
Only glitch here was when I decided to adjust volume at the start of Percolator (17 seconds in), which unfortunately, produces a stutter...I removed the worst of it, but you can here what sounds like the track speeding up for a split second as a result. Every woven Persian rug has an imperfection; that is mine.
NOTE: This is a 24 bit / 48khz seed, which will need to be downsampled to convert to CD-A format. DOWNLOAD / STREAM (pCloud link)
REMEMBER - PLEASE don't leverage this recording for material gain, Stereolab is known to be taper-friendly, so don't betray their faith in us. And keep the MP3s to your iPods.
2020 note: 2008 me was pretty quaint in what I chose to focus on. In reality, I didn't know very much about Stereolab and their importance to independent music, even if I had seen them once prior in 1993 at none other than Mod Lang Records in Berkeley CA. I do have a full recording of it on VHS that I was loaned, but alas it's been misplaced to my utter shame.
The only track that seems to be online from this seminal performance is "John Cage Bubblegum".
UPDATE - not true any longer, back in 2021, I shared the complete recording of Mod Lang + Berkeley Square!
There's also some video from the 2008 Fillmore appearance on YouTube, which I've playlisted. However, it seems that both filmers went to the following night's show (from 22nd October), and not the one I went to as Laetitia's outfit is different than in the pics that I took. It's pretty fragmentary but I'll work at ID'ing the ones w/o titles...and see if I can sequence them better...
