On June 21st, my partner and I were fortunate to perform together in the inaugural event organized by sarahsarahturnerturner (sstt) as Cathode Valley - "Dolphins Aliens Angels" at the Rockin' Rollers Skate Rink in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
When we were approached by sstt to perform - I was excited but felt challenged and a little out of my comfort zone. As of this point I had largely made slow ambient or drone pieces with percussion and voice recordings - music that I'd classify as "high tension, dark electronic". I wasn't sure if what I typically make was a good fit for a the venue and audience. But figuring that sstt knew best - I took the challenge to try and push myself to make a longer form composition with smaller sections of varying tempo with some transitions between them.
Another challenge I gave myself was to try and be fully battery powered and to have more mixing flexibility. This led to the purchase of a Zoom L6 and the inclusion of my trusty (and soon-to-be battery powered) Shield XL as well as a Hachi-Ni MIDI controller. The idea was to use one m8 for composition elements I did not want to process (such as drums or bass) and to put everything else on the other m8. I was then able to use the Zoom L6 to provide an Auxiliary Send of the m8 to-be-processed to the Shield XL. This ended up giving me three stereo channels to play with.
- Clean m8 of Drums and Bass
- Clean m8 of Everything Else
- Return of the latter m8 after being processed by the Shield XL (running the Barcode script)
And all of this comfortably fit into a Pelican Storm IM2500 case - which can be taken on commercial flights as a Carry-On Bag.
The video at the top of this post was taken by sstt. Though I had forgotten to hit 'Record' on the Zoom L6 during my performance so I re-created the performance at home, then added some slight mixing and production touches and brought it into the video that sstt had provided.