Continuing with "The Japan Journals 1947-2004," I start to wonder if I should be recording more of the events of my life, but don't want to turn this into a simple journal, and am far too lazy to start up a separate journal, having enough trouble keeping this up as it is. Herein, a dump of the past couple weeks, hopefully not too tedious.

First, is it just me or are there some annoyingly widespread trends in movie titles? I'll accept Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, but then you've got After the Sunset, Before Night Falls, Between Sunset and the Dusk Before Sunrise, After the time Before the Sun...I'm also bothered by the temporal proximity of "Beyond the Sea" and "The Sea Inside," both terrible titles in their own right. I'm ready to blame Javier Bardem for all this.

The newly incarnated "the zero effect" played its first shows on the 15th, 16th, and 21st of this month. It was Zach's idea to use that name again, and I won't be defending its merits in any more arguments. We decided that to make the process of starting to perform easier on us, we would not go the route of a venue. Instead we played in my living room. This gave us the chance to do a lot of preparation of the space ahead of time, and hook up as many devices as we wanted without worrying about other bands and time slots. It also ensured that only friends and friends of friends would see the show, but for our debut, that seemed an acceptable limitation. At some point I came up with the conceit that this would be the first in a series of shows in places other than usual music venues, and that we'd ask people who saw the shows to come up with other ideas for future shows, for example in places where they live or work or otherwise frequent and have access to. We ended up with a couple of ideas but not quite what I had hoped for, so if any readers have anything, please leave a comment. We'll play just about anywhere.

Anyway, this show we called "darkroom," and we made the living room very very dark by using fabric to close it off from all light sources. Then we made some DIY spotlights with very focused beams and some blue and red gels, to show only on our faces when we played. We did 12 songs, with 5 of them serving more as interludes, chances for us to do more experimental stuff and give people's minds a break from the somewhat dense content of the songs. I printed up programs giving the song titles and information about the concert series thing, on fancy textured art paper, though I was advised that no one could read them in the darkness. Our 3rd member, Shayna, didn't have much time to practice for this show, so we sort of exploited that by having her make a dramatic entrance halfway through and then play on the last 4 songs. The entrance consisted of her being secreted away in the adjacent bedroom until the appointed time, when she started pounding her floor tom and then marched slowly into the living room with it. The other 'special' thing we did was an interlude called "the conversation," which I don't want to give away entirely because we may want to do it again, but if you're familar with the source of the title you can probably guess at the general nature of it.

The intended effect of the darkness and everything else was both to confuse people and to force them to focus on the sound at the exclusion of any other sensory input (except taste, for the jerks who were munching on tortilla chips). But as we should have expected, many had no trouble figuring out and even anticipating our subterfuges, while others were confused in ways we couldn't possibly have planned. Some people had little idea who was in the band afterward. Others had trouble telling whether some of the interludes were produced intentionally or were merely the sound of our equipment malfunctioning and me trying to fix it. One person whom I hadn't met before simply stared at me blankly for a good 15 minutes while I chatted with a coworker, seeming to want to say "What...what?!?!"

At the end of it all I was pretty exhausted, physically, mentally and musically (I got some food poisoning the night before the last show and was up the entire night vomiting and locked in a loop of thought, but that's another story). I'm proud to say that this was probably the best show I've ever done with a band in terms of pure quality of performance, though it was by no shortcut, only an extended period of writing and rehearsing that we may not be able to repeat. If anyone wants mp3s let me know.