Winter showed up a while ago. I went into hiding. I've been working a lot. Working at work and working on my band. We played a show at a local Irish pub. Good times. I've also been doing a lot of traveling -all within Texas. Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. All of this is basically my attempt at making an excuse for not posting for two months. Oops. At either rate, I'm here, I'm back, and I'm ready to write. Run and hide.

I saw the Polyphonic Spree Holiday Extravaganza a couple weeks ago at the Granada Theater here in Dallas. In case you have no idea what any of that means, The Polyphonic Spree is an odd orchestral rock band with a varying lineup of musicians depending on the size of the venue. It's a little difficult to describe. The Polyphonic Spree creates positive music. It rocks. It's huge. It's complicated. It's a firehose of instrumentation. It's a wall of sound. Imagine a scaled-down orchestra complete with strings, horns, harp, flute, and percussion, combined with a six-piece choir, a rock band, a keyboard player, another keyboard player with sampling devices, and singer/conductor who sporadically jumps onto a podium to sing.

Some of the instruments get lost in the mix. The harp, flute, and strings were completely drowned out by the horns, choir, and rock band. There's a reason why orchestras don't have that many different types of instruments. Strings only work well when accompanied by other instruments when there are lots of strings to boost the sound. Horns, on the other hand, naturally push more air and need less amplification and can easily cut through the mix. The Polyphonic Spree ignores all of these usual constraints and throws together a patchwork quilt of instruments. I've been told that getting the sound mix right at live shows is a tricky task, and that if the sound is not mixed just right, the show is unlistenable.

The show itself was phenomenal. They played moving images on two gigantic movie projectors on either side of the venue hall throughout the entirety of the show. The first part of the show was the Christmas set. They covered Christmas songs of all types, some of which i knew, most of which i didn't. They also played a song from The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack which prompted me to watch the move twice the following week. I hadn't seen it since its release in the 90s.

The second half of the show, which went till after 2 am, was the "normal," non-Christmas set. Interspersed throughout the evening were other side-acts that helped distract us from the length of the show (it started at 8 and ended at 2:something). I was late to the show so I only caught two of the side acts. One was a subset of musicians from the main band that donned baroque wigs and played original and cover songs, one of which was Because by The Beatles. The other side act I saw was Morgan Taylor, a guy who created an entire world of music, images, and other media about a character he created named Gustafer Yellowgold. It seemed to be geared towards kids, but i found it catchy and kind of refreshing and innocent.

The Polyphonic Spree also liberally blasted the space above the audience with confetti and dumped balloons on our heads. The guy next to me lost his glasses to a stray balloon, only to recover them thanks to someone 10 feet away who found them on the floor.

A photographer also took pictures of the band and audience. I made it into several of the pictures. Here's one of them.

Where's Particleman?

Blog posts to come: New Toadies album, new Breeders album, re-discovering old music, finding the funk, and trying to stay in shape.

I added an author post-sorting mechanism. Finally. You can now sort posts by the various and sundry authors that have appeared on this blog. Please direct your attention to the new heading "CONTRIBUTORS" underneath "PROPRIETOR" and marvel at the new links.

You're welcome. My Chrismukkah present to you. It only took me three years.

My Beatles band practices at a practice space called Universal Rehearsal. Down the hall from our little 11x11 room are two large padlocked double doors with a sign that reads, "Smile, you're on candid camera, stupid!" to deter would-be thieves from attempting any foolishness. I originally thought it was a storage room for the owners of the building.

Last week i went to practice and noticed that the doors were open. This was the first time in a year that I had ever seen the doors open. The room dwarfed my band's practice room. To my surprise, it was not a storage room. Well, it may very well be a storage room for the time being, but not for the building owners. In the room I saw stacks of speakers and music equipment cases with "TOADIES" spray painted on the cases. A large drum riser sat against one wall. The room is the practice space for the band The Toadies. I knew they practiced in the building, but I didn't exactly know they were down the hall. Cool.