So that's where that was...

You know, not too long ago, Marty samarin had suggested that we challenge ourselves to, every week, not only split infinitives across long stretches of text, but also to find somebody that doesn't go to Tech somewhere in the city, and hang out with them for at least an hour, and have an interesting conversation... so thus far, we've done that twice this weekend...

So on Friday, after Ashok's AI class, Rick (a fellow AI-inclined undergrad) invited me to a show, which I think he thought was going to be more-or-less a scratch-DJ sort of deal... and I thought that this sounded lovely, and Rick is pretty cool, so I opted to go.

And Marty decided to go as well... so we were off to Eyedrum, which isn't terribly far from here. Eyedrum itself is based on this massively cool idea -- it's a nonprofit organization, and they have some warehouse-ish space in Downtown, where they do Interesting and Artistic Things, like have this concert. Seriously, go look at their website right now and read about all the interesting stuff that happens there....

So on Friday, the show was done by the Gruppe Freie Elektronische, which is a band consisting of five (or six, I guess, if you count the guy who runs the sound board) grown gentlemen, and they have a drumset, and a stand-up bass, and keyboards and synthesizers and an iBook, and saxophones and sampled sound effects and a slide guitar... and their sound is... essentially just interesting random noise, but it gradually evolves, and sometimes patterns emerge in it. Like at one point, towards the end of their first set, they had this sample of a chunk of a trumpet melody, and they played it over and over and over, until you forgot that the sound was there. And then... when it was gone, then you noticed it. Aside from that, they're like this not-overly-loud wall of ambient, interesting sound, which to me, felt sort of ... old... like the sort of music you'd find if you pointed your radio antenna out into deep space and found some station coming across from a million years ago... or like dinosaurs howling to each other. It was pretty cool. And their drummer had all sorts of random equipment, and he would drag lengths of chain across his cymbals. And drop stuff on the floor to see how it sounded.

It looked like they were having a lot of fun :)

Maria Chavez was apparently the headliner, if you could call her that, for the show, if you could call it that... she was really interesting as well, sort of a really friendly, semi-quiet hispanic (Peruvian, in fact) young lady who does Abstract Improvisational Turntablism... which means, essentially, that she makes interesting noises by ruining records. That was pretty cool, too, although perhaps not quite as easy to sit through. Marty described it as "almost unlistenable" at one point, I think -- but he meant it in the most complimentary way possible. There was this other guy who was doing weird stuff to an analogue video feed that looked like he'd been videotaping a teevee screen and getting the colourful blips going by... and he was projecting this (and messing with it in realtime, I believe) while Maria was doing her improvisational abstract turntablism. And this was an interesting effect...

... and the audience at Eyedrum, who'd shown up for this... was really the sort of crowd that you would expect for this sort of event. Very interesting-looking, sort of intellectually eclectic people. I heartily approve of this place -- perhaps next time we go, the music will be a bit more musical... but I think we do need to get into an Experimental Noise band :)

Rick introduced us to his friends Ryan and Danielle, who were also there, and we spoke with them for a while. It turns out that Ryan's this massively intelligent, laid-back and wide-eyed Physics major here -- do you know him, Ross? He plays the piano with the orchestra, apparently... and Danielle is at GSU, and she's into Music Production, and plays the bass... and we ended up going with them over to R. Thomas (although they got quite lost on the way over, and we ended up driving through most of the city on the way there), which is this glorious veggie-friendly 24-hour restaurant with the tastiest, freshest, organic-est vegetables (and freaking quinoa -- who serves quinoa in a restaurant? That's unheard-of!) ever in their "Thai Express Bowl". Gaahhh... and Ryan is disturbingly knowledgeable in a disturbingly wide variety of topics. Hopefully we'll hang out with them again :)

Saturday, I went running and kind of ambiently hung around and read and whatnot... and Corey's brother Eric came over, and we had tasty Thai food and long philosophical discussions...

... and today, thus far, we've hung out with Mel delamancha, and I'm working on stuff and trying to get comfortable with emacs, which it seems like I eventually need to do.

By the way -- any emacs users out there know how to set the colours so that it's white-text-on-black by default?

And Amber child_herald is coming by later on, on her way back up to Erskine...

... and that's that, I think.