Heather’s out west somewhere, Missouri? Probably. I’m driving through Olney, fighting traffic to get from gig A to gig B with a kind of spectacular amount of downtime betwixt the two. Mayhaps I’ve finally found a client who allows for MORE than the expected time for a project!
I drove fast through the smaller roads out of Olney towards Takoma Park, enjoying the sunshine and the speed more than I ought to. Listening to 90s rock blaring out of my barely-post 90s speakers and singing along to words that were barely intelligible even if you owned the album and tried to read along with the cassette J-card. I was pretending I was Heather, out on an open highway with no schedule but my own, but it was a lie, and coming up to a busy traffic light showed it for what it was. Then the construction. Then fender bender. Then the next light. There’s no road freedom here. Just stop and go.
Monday I was recording Acacia, but we took a break to nab Kristen and go down the block to Amy and Nate’s to watch the eclipse. The light dimmed and the shadows changed, every leaf throwing down a slowly evolving crescent, and we watched through special glasses and through phones and filters and through the clouds themselves as the moon ALMOST covered the sun. It was amazing to me how many people were just driving by as if nothing was amiss with the sky, and annoyed that a client called literally at the moment of as-totality-as-it-was-gonna-get. I called him back later and said “sorry, was watching the eclipse” and he responded “yeah, underwhelming wasn’t it?”
I grow fatigued of your blasé, human.
Amy and Nate were doing it right, lining up eclipse movies (they’d just wrapped up Ladyhawke) and after we took an hour to watch the sun dim, darken, and undim again, they dove back in to related festivities, but Acacia and I returned to recording in the Lair, capturing sound as if there was no tomorrow.
Unfortunately, the recording session was a little FRAUGHT. More takes and more takes, if we’d been using tape we’d have worn through it, but we got there eventually. I, with my Ibuprofin PM hangover and Acacia with just hitting up some of her most precious material, I think we were just moving kind of slowly. I was also having some weird technical issues, and though Cacie’s session was not affected (we started a little late, but I think we were both HAPPY to start a little late), I think I lost some data on both recent Morsbergers’ recordings. Frustrating, Live magic never to be reproduced. [robnote : I actually DID (mostly) salvage this!!]
Last week (and this week, really) was just so DENSE I’ve been struggling to keep up with the DATA of it all, and I’m really, really sad that the audio from the Juels, Joey and rob show is probably gone (the lighting engineer cut power to the stage at the end of the night causing the recording to glitch, and I’ve only been able to salvage disjointed static) as well as the audio from Sunday night’s open mic (I have NO idea what happened here and it’s freaking me out, it seemed like some sort of random disconnect while I was transferring the data). I can wax poetic about the ephemeral nature of Live music, but the open mic recording is filling me with an almost nauseating feeling of equipment unsurety. There have been a NUMBER of massive glitches in my Life in the last year or so resulting in varying levels of data loss, and I really need to just spend some more money on data storage, and some TIME on data organization!
Sigh.
The boring shit.
Well, in any case – I’ve killed half an hour and have three hours left before I HAVE to set up for the Spark. I wish… I wish… I wish I could just take a NAP.
*zzzz*
(but I’ll spend time uploading photographs of our time over at Amy and Nate’s watching the eclipse instead). Kristen remembered the sieve trick, Amy and Nate had spare eclipse glasses, the birds went nuts, the bees went silent, and the world came through yet another sign of the apocalypse unscathed. Only a matter of time though)
