Johnny Marr in Asheville: Moving Forward But Finally Looking Back Fondly

"Mr. Marr, it is such a pleasure," I say, taking his hand in mine without looking at it. I am magnetized to his dark eyes and familiar Manchester haircut, which I have a complete view of, standing at least a couple of inches over him. I thank myself for deciding against those four-inch ankle boots.

Johnny Marr has just emerged from his dressing room. He's wearing the same black dress shirt--buttoned fully to his throat--and crushed velvet blazer he wore during the show, but he's clearly freshened up because there is no olfactory evidence to suggest he was just sweating on stage for 90 minutes in this insanely hot-looking outfit. My version of Heaven suddenly features a room full of rock legends smelling exactly like Johnny Marr does at this very moment. (I'll spare you the details of the other goings-on in that room.)

"I really enjoy your new record," I tell him honestly. He smiles and tilts his ear politely toward me to hear. "Why The Messenger? Why now? What does The Messenger mean to you?" I ask, the first of 16 simultaneously burning questions to percolate.

"Well you know," he begins, his thick Mancunian accent bursting pleasingly from his gut, "it's about carrying the message, even if it's negative. You know, puh-tting yer 'ead in the lion's mouth, so to speak." I admittedly haven't listened to the lyrics of the upbeat, guitar-driven album enough to immediately access a reference, so I ask him which songs best represent that idea.

But before he can answer, two bouncy women suddenly interrupt our conversation, one of them quick with a story about her friend's dog who finds sexual gratification sitting on the edge of an electric fence. I swing a mental hatchet squarely into her face.

And thus begins the process of my removal from the Orange Peel.

***

Most famous as the guitarist/co-writer for the game-changing Smiths, Johnny Marr is now touring what is called his first solo album (even though he's already released an album with his current band The Healers?). The Messenger comes after 26 years of post-Smiths collaborations, which include stints with The Pretenders, The The, The Cribs, Modest Mouse, and innumerable session works.

I learned the night before that I'd won a pair of post-show Meet & Greet passes, in my mind a fantastic opportunity to conduct a casual interview. My heart all a-flutter, I loosely formulated what sort of questions I would ask and did some research to determine the sort I would not (*cough* Morrissey *cough*).

All day I tried to find a taker for the extra M&G pass, but to my utter disbelief I failed to find another fan who wanted it. In shock and horror, I forfeited it at the box office and entered the venue. I could see then why it wasn't an obviously simple task; I'd scarcely seen such a small crowd for any Orange Peel show. But before long I was swallowing my mind's tongue; not everyone lives in my bubble of reality, and at a show like this, there is not actually room for people who don't totally want to be there.

The crowd erupted as the band entered the stage. The hard-driving opener "The Right Thing Right" from the new album set the tone for the evening, Johnny's signature jangling guitar fresh but reminiscent of the work that made him famous, his lead vocals also strong and satisfying. When the epic introductory chords of the classic Smiths song "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" rang out next, it was clear we had all heard it before. And fuck no we didn't stop him. 

Not from the Asheville show, but he wore the same outfit

For years the guitarist tried to distance himself from the painful breakup of the painfully short but intense Smiths relationship (1982-87). Never the type to capitalize on cheap gossip or nostalgia, Johnny only recently started playing Smiths songs live again (for which fans are endlessly grateful), but it's not just the acrimonious separation of the Smiths that discouraged him from satisfying his audience's sickly withdrawals: Johnny Marr is first and foremost an ever-evolving artist. This is clear from the first Smiths album to the last (FUCK YEAH STRANGEWAYS!), as too from his work in Electronic to that with Modest Mouse. He's not going to stick around playing the same old guitar, getting old and fat and dying all the time.

He graced us with a 20-song set, six of them classic Smiths tracks. He played his solos intimately to the crowd, that sexual rock energy I love so much almost too much to bear. I realize now that my signature move is staring mouth agape at the sight of revolutionary fingers flying down a fret board.

***

Despite my clear intentions to hog his attention entirely, Johnny's got to move on. After the anecdote about the masochistic dog, I notice a line of impatient fans standing patiently behind me.

Now that I've talked to him, I am immediately approached by a security guard to please get the fuck out. I slither out of his line of vision and observe quietly on the side. He turns around and repeats his request, this time rather more of a demand. I look into his eyes and tell him "I understand," but I stay put. A British guy from Johnny's personal crew appears then, a little more emphatic about it, but I maintain my position.

"He's not Santa, where you sit on his lap and take a picture. He's a music legend," I tell them. They've heard it all before and are not as amused with me as I am with myself. This goes on for another couple of minutes before I decide it's probably better to simply back away (dramatically) than to make a real scene. 

While I am delighted that I got to ask at least one of the questions I had prepared (only one about Morrissey, I swear, and that's more of a comment), I am tired of being a nameless fan. I need a press pass.

Johnny Marr's American tour is now over, but you're in luck if you're Australian.

Ta-ta for now!

      

   

Pretty Sure Motion Control Technology is the Future of Audiovisual Production...And it's Happening Now

Technology moves fast, and unfortunately brilliant ideas don't mean much unless you are a programmer/developer/tech wizard with the know-how to bring your ideas to life. For the rest of us, by the time we've even heard of some new innovation, there are already two or three generations of it. Same is true for music and now, I think, all other audiovisual production methods.

Nonetheless, here I've been all my life, daydreaming away, trying to intellectualize some new way of combining my two greatest passions in life (aside from human relationships and all that jazz): dance and music. By the looks of this blog you may not realize that as well as a music obsessive, I am a diehard dancer. The dance floor is where I belong; it has always been my home and my church. I've accepted the reality that I may not ever again make it to the stage, having followed paths in life which have rendered a professional career in dance impractical, and perhaps impossible. 

But I've never truly given up the ghost. 

AND NOW, LIFE IS NEW AGAIN and birds are chirping. In my recent quest to find innovation in dance and also nurture my desire to create music, I determined that the missing link between dance and music, or dance and stage visuals, is the dancer becoming the musician/technician (and vice versa). What if, in the context of a live music experience, the dancer were no longer resigned to looking pretty on stage when there's not much else to look at? Why can't the body-in-motion be the vehicle for the audiovisual experience, a central player in the production journey?

I dunno, fuck, something like that maybe

Enter motion-controlled AV technology, like the Xbox Kinect, Leap Motion, and even Wii before that (but I'm pretty sure Wii is in a bar somewhere with the Blackberry, drowning their sorrows of obsolescence). The Kinect, like Wii, was originally intended as a way for gamers to control the screen action with their own body movements (getting gamers off their asses may be the most impressive thing about this technology, actually). But of course artists took that idea and blew it the fuck up (motion-controlled music production is not entirely new. The theremin has been around since 1928, and Jimmy Page famously used it in live Zeppelin performances, but somehow expanding on that idea is just now catching fire). 

Last night a friend sent me this video of musician/tech queen Imogen Heap presenting her "musical gloves" at a music tech conference in 2012. I have been buggin out ever since. With the help of a whole technology team, she developed the gloves to be "gestural music ware," allowing her to create and make fine manipulations to sounds and effects, real-time in 3D space, without touching her clunky old instruments (skip to 13:30 if you just want to see her demo a song).

There are loads of examples of motion-controlled art already happening, some filmmakers but mainly straight musicians who are already making their art with production software like Ableton Live and don't seem to really need or care about using the entire body in performance.   

It is the complexity and sheer responsiveness of these gloves which seems to differentiate it from other Kinect-based gestural productions. In videos I'm seeing of people using Kinect + Ableton but not the glove tech, movements seem to be limited to hands and arms (so too with Leap Motion). So I have a lot of questions: is the current technology being applied to movement of the whole body? Is it easy enough to make real-time songs with the Kinect, not just manipulate effects whose sonic construction is pre-programmed? Could a producer be doing one thing and a dancer complement it through gestural tech? Can I designate different body parts to different instrument families and switch between them at any time? Can I add lights?! WHERE CAN I GET THE GLOVES??!!

I'm not a born techie, and I've never had consistent patience to compose songs with production software, but this, Christ Almighty. Get my body involved, and I am there all the way. It's all too much. I'm so excited. I haven't been this turned on since Dave Gahan reached his arm out and smiled at my crazy ass dancing at my first Depeche Mode concert. 

So for all you developers/programmers/tech wizards who make dreams come true, hit me up. Let's do this before we are all dead.

First Annual Mountain Oasis Festival Successfully Takes Moogfest's Reins

When Asheville heard that our semi-beloved Moogfest would not be taking place this October, we were admittedly not devastated, but never ones to forget the promise of a good party, we collectively wondered: so what's taking its place then? Enter Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Summit, the newborn festival that has successfully greased the path for Moogfest to quietly step out to fulfill its greater life purpose in the springtime. After just a three-year run of the always-a-little-weird (not entirely cool weird) Moogfest, the much more clear-headed Mountain Oasis seems to be just the thing to satisfy Asheville's now desperate need for a pre-Halloween/end of festival season festival fix. 

Photo by AVL's own J Smilanic

The festival ran Fri Oct 25-Sun Oct 27, but having just spent a massive four days in Austin the previous weekend, I only bought a ticket for Saturday night. Also, I was really only intent on seeing electronic music pioneer Gary Numan and Nine Inch Nails, because, well, I didn't think I cared enough for Friday and Sunday's headliners and wasn't familiar with any of the non-headlining acts.

Fifteen minutes late, I calmly walked (cuz I got reprimanded for running) onto the US Cellular Center floor to find a sparse but mostly interested crowd swaying and nodding to Gary Numan. Dressed in a dark graphic tee and black jeans, the legend floated around the smoky stage, strangling the microphone, his trademark yowl slicing through the thick atmosphere. A setlist dominated by his most recent album Splinter, I was surprised at how heavy and, dare I say, gothic his sound has become--no easy tinky synth sounds of old--but the depth of it felt very, very good in my body.

Gary Numan on Saturday night. Photo by someone at NPR

I, probably like 99.99% of the crowd, only really knew his 1979 breakout hit "Cars," but it's Gary goddamn Numan, one of the first musicians to bring electronics to the pop scene, one of the major influences on Trent Reznor and Depeche Mode (and vice versa) and thereby every single electronic artist since. He may have completely fallen off the radar over the last 30 years, but when that man is in town, you go see his fucking show.

And all 12 of us were lucky to be there.

Later that night I spoke to him outside one of his tour buses, his black eyeliner bleeding down his aged but familiar face. Lovely guy. We rapped for a couple minutes before one of his crew pulled him away to do an interview on the bus, and my blood bubbled on medium-high heat with envy.

Nine Inch Nails, touring their first album in five years, was obviously a big draw as headliner (I still made it into the venue and wherever I wanted in the crowd with relative ease). T-Rez is apparently at the top of his game, several years sober and looking damn good, all buff and shit. His new album Hesitation Marks shows he's not as angry as he always famously was, which is fine, but he still delivers his classic material with convincing outrage. My favorite moment was the catharsis of shout-singing "Head Like a Hole." Yerrrrssss.

Saturday night had a very tough, gloomy feel, but in plowing through the darkness, my heart became light.

So I found myself at the festival again on Sunday. I remember PANTyRAiD being ridiculous but having sweet dancers and Disclosure generally blowing my mind, but it was the weekend's closer that fractured us only to glue us all together again in perfect symmetry. Yes of course it was fucking Pretty Lights.

Now I've always felt sort of pffft about Pretty Lights via stereo system, but I am often surrounded by people who are real serious about him, and I was curious to see what all the hullabaloo was about. While under normal circumstances I would never consider standing in the back balcony, that's where my crew was, and WOW! I stood corrected. The sound was fantastic, the view of the madness below (and all around) unparalleled.

Pretty Lights really were...
Photo by J Smilanic

Derek Smith (aka Pretty Lights) and his tight live band threw down with an energy I can't even imagine summoning eight days a week like they do. To me, obviously, it was fresh, a magnetic whirlpool into which the crowd was immediately swept. Best light show I've ever seen. The man himself was noticeably intoxicated, but it only amusingly affected his speech, not his groove. As for my groove? I managed to bust any and all of my moves in that small foot space between seat rows. Success.

A little humbled, a lot awed, and apparently just now recovered from it, I bless the forehead of the newly christened, bouncing baby Mountain Oasis. Let Asheville nurture it, and it will grow.