Post-Gut Wrench Analysis...

Had my first solo/duo gig last night at Pit's Salon. An extraordinary evening... A large crowd for an apartment performance - 32, 35 patrons? Very attentive, all in good humor. We began with a pair of songs I'd written in 2005, "Bluebeard Gave the Key to His Wife" (originally fleshed out and co-written with Andrew W.K.) and "Prohibitionally Yours," which had never previously been performed in public. Pit (Noack) spent weeks preparing his backing tapes, and his dedication and immersive rigor paid tremendous dividends... Er, okay, let's forget the speculative argot, and stick to facts - we practiced for a month, and as Pit was meticulous in his choice of sounds, my job was made infinitely easier. There was a 10-minute interlude, and then I returned with a pair of solo pieces. The first, "Pashtun Graverobber," dates back to my brief tenure (late 2006) as a member of Black Meat. The second, written for the occasion, was "Poet's Sarcoma." The title and lyrics were lodged - complete, full-blown-- in my skull as I awoke on the morning of the 19th. I scribbled them down, thought about cadences and patterns for a few minutes, created a backing track while waiting for the first patrons of the salon to arrive, and premiered it 45 minutes later. Awesome response from the attendees, both for Pit's imaginative tape work and my own strangled grunting... Of course, the digital recorder's batteries died after nine minutes. Every bloody second of the previous eight hours of rehearsals was documented. It made perfect sense that the moment of truth would be both revelatory and (primarily) unknowable...

Passing through the void,

Tom