2010年05月10日

If there's any better evidence for how busy this past weekend was, it was my 12 hour hibernation last night. Yesterday involved a solid ten hours recording at Luke's for The Redbucks' upcoming album (and we are are ever-so-quickly finding ourselves further and further outside of our set deadlines). We kicked Luke's poor girlfriend out and embarked on recording the vocal tracks, that with our three and sometimes four-part harmonies, seem like layers without end. Hopefully, by today and tomorrow we'll finish up and have it ready for mastering by Black Cat Bone's lead guitarist and thrasher Jaime Welton, who's agreed to lend us his expertise so long as Chip and Chris build him a website for his metal band Bad Mamasan. The Beijing music scene's beautifully small and navigable in that way. It just so happens that he and our bassist, Jackson, live right across the hall from each other. Jackson's a great example of the music family tree that exists among the scene here, which I would love to share in a visual at a later day. 

This past weekend myself and The Redbucks (minus Amy) played a 30 minute set at the Ditan Folk Festival. The two day festival offered Beijingers a chance to lounge on grass (the only time you are allowed to lie on grass in Chinese parks is when there's a festival, I've learned), drink smuggled Yanjings and listen to some spectacular bands (and admittedly some not so spectacular, or so folk for that matter). We played on the first day of the festival (May 8) and shared the stage with: Xiao Meng, Lv Weiqing/Hong Yuetan, Su Yu, Wang Juan, Buyi, Zhang Quan, Hoochie Coochie Gentlemen, Zhang Si'an, Migratory Bird (featuring the talent of French accordionist Marie-Claude) and HangGai. 

It was honestly the first time in a long while that I felt nervous before going up on stage to play a show. None of us had ever played a real festival before, and while the vibe was really pleasant and chill (everything I would've wanted MIDI to be, but wasn't) people were intently listening to us, which doesn't happen so much when you play bars. It was, in effect, quite sobering. We opened the show with All That Glitters, which is a Redbucks anthem that Luke wrote. There was a momentary pause after the song ended, which left us feeling slightly panicky for a second. That is, until the whole place erupted into applause. It felt fucking awesome. I couldn't say we played our best show. There were wrong notes, feedback and tempo issues, but people got really into it, which makes the technical stuff seem pretty paltry. And it doesn't hurt that we had a bubble machine. Don't believe me? Go here and scroll down to the bottom of the page.