Announcement
yoctonaut will perform a set at Kraftwerk Reimagined in Pittsburgh, at Howler's on Saturday, May 5, opening for Raised By Machines and Universal Beat Union. Look--there's a poster:

Report
As I tend to do, I went off the edge of the cliff with this one: first full-length hometown yoctonaut set, first gig with the iPad, first gig with the Moog guitar, first gig approaching Kraftwerk as subject matter. Add in little time for rehearsal and no rehearsal with the other people on the guitary one I wanted to do, and it probably shouldn't have worked at all. And yet...it did. A benevolence looks out for fools and for musicians who make things difficult for themselves as a kind of reflex.

The yoctonaut set went well enough--some miscues, but no one in the audience is going to know the intended cues, so no harm. The inspired-by-Kraftwerk pieces were maybe more dance-oriented than the audience, but it was impossible to see them to gauge reaction. People applauded between numbers, so I must have done all right, but I had doubts about my track selection, thinking one minute in to most songs that I should have picked another. Typical yoctonaut gig. One thing I hadn't counted on was the accentuated high end of the stage monitors, which had snare and hi-hat digging into my ears. Alien Verbs is working out well, and I pulled out yMotorik, appropriately. Summer Db might not have been the best choice--now it seems to me to need a B section, and I should have gone with either a promising older piece I'm updating, or one of the Trailer Space ones.

Last tune, I did "Heavy Metal Kids," asking for assistance from Steve (Raised by Machines), Paul (Raised by Machines, Universal Beat Union), and Eric (Universal Beat Union)--a good move, since I ended up holding down the simple riff, and it would have been a bit thin if it had been just me. It was occasionally difficult to detect the Moog guitar in the monitors, and by the end I couldn't hear it at all--just 60Hz hum. It turns out I turned the filter resonance all the way down, and the subtlety of the filter got lost in the fuzz. There may have also been a loose cable involved. Freaked me out the next morning trying to figure out why things were still not working, until I identified that. But people seemed to dig it.

Raised By Machines was great, and the standout for me was Steve's solo improv on the Voyager, with heavy use of the expression pad and ring modulator. That was a fine section indeed. Fantastic.

Universal Beat Union was good, psychedelic, and triply, kind of like Maserati with keyboards and without Jerry Fuchs (RIP). Unfortunately, by that point it was late at night and I was entirely exhausted. But it was a great show with an appreciative audience, which is always a victory.