Independence Day Weekend: I'm all over town

I've got a handful of performances coming up this weekend. Saturday and Sunday, I have a piece in the Source Festival (more on that later). And on Sunday night, DCIC is performing at Electric Possible with a handful of other bands.

Electric Possible is monthly concert held at George Washington University. The focus is on experimental music of different kinds. This month's lineup includes some good stuff. We're performing along with PRV Trio (Anthony Pirog, Ed Ricart, and Scott Verrastro), Seventh Ring of Saturn (from Atlanta), Cash $lave Clique, and maybe others.

DCIC will have a rehearsal before this show, which is something I'm looking forward to. We haven't played together since our in-store at Crooked Beat back in early May. So this will be fun, we get to play together on Thursday night in Ben's basement and then again on Sunday at GWU. Twice in one week! Woo Hoo!

The details:
Phillips Hall,
801 22nd St, NW,
Rm B120 (in the basement)
(22nd and H Streets/GW Metro)
George Washington University
8pm, $5

And now about this Source Festival thing... I was assigned collaborators as part of the festival's "Interdisciplinary Mash-Ups" initiative:

Mash-ups are the pairing together of artists from at least two different disciplines each with the goal of creating, in under three month’s time, a new interdisciplinary performance piece 15 to 30 minutes long.

I got paired with two dancers. This gig doesn't pay very well, so we had to address the conflicting issues of making a substantial (15 minutes long is substantial as far as I'm concerned) new work when we aren't being compensated for our time, while simultaneously we don't want to present something that's totally weak. Laura and Stephen were also keenly aware of this conundrum so we looked around for material that we already have on hand, that would be available to use as a starting point.

I brought them a piece of ambient guitar music that I recorded a while back and haven't used for anything, and Laura remembered a short 8mm film that her dad made in 1970 called "Paint it Blue," that she'd been wanting to use for something. Turns out there was a hint of a theme between them. My piece, "Romance of the Surveillance Machines," is up on myspace if you want to hear it. The film documents an episode where the Schandelmeiers were painting the outside of their downtown bar/restaurant one afternoon (with a small crowd of volunteers) and the cops showed up and starting arresting people for no good reason.

Laura's parents came over for dinner one night, and I brought my recording gear. They told us the story of the restaurant and how they wound up being harassed by police (and eventually the Airline Pilots Association as well) and lost everything: the business and the building. I went home with around 90 minutes of audio, and took a stab at editing it down. My first batch of edits got us down to 18 minutes. I gave that to Laura and Stephen, and they built a video around the interview clips, using the original film and some other footage. Last night, I made a final version of the audio track with the interviews, and background music (derived from the pre-existing piece mentioned above) and now I think we're done. Laura and Stephen have generated some new movement/dance material that will happen on stage along with the film.

Performances are this coming Saturday, 2pm and 8pm, and again on Sunday at 2pm. Some genius set us up for two matinees and only one evening show... and we get paid via a tiny slice of the door. I'm such a sucker. No, I mean, here's the link to buy tickets - enjoy the show! It's gonna be great! (We're in the show titled, "Group E.")