so many names

[jfb]

I don't know if I've mentioned here that I've started to play the accordion. I've been playing the melodica for a couple of years, but I was convinced I didn't have the manual dexterity to play a keyboard with one hand, push chord buttons with the other, and drive a bellows with both arms. Then one night in Seattle a drunken accordionist dragged me out onto the sidewalk, strapped an accordion onto me, and gave me my first accordion lesson.

So a year later, I finally bought one when I stopped for coffee in Eugene, Oregon, and a few months after that I pulled it out from under a shelf and started getting familiar with it. Since then I've played out with it a few times, mostly with Philip Rodriguez (several of his songs, and we did a quietly menacing cover of Johnny Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails Song "Hurt") and Meredith Edgar (originals again, plus the happiest version ever of a Smiths song about being killed by a bus). BTW, I just learned from Dan Tripp that Meredith's CD is now on CDBaby.

Last night I went out to Lisa Dewey and the Lotus Life's CD release party. The first opening act was Tub, about the rockingest accordion-based band I've seen. I'm not sure whether it was a normal accordion being run through effects or some kind of cyborg accordion synthesizer, but it was very cool. There are a bunch of MP3s on their site; my favorite is the live one, "Promise", despite some glitches toward the end.

Comments

cool

[talking-sock.livejournal.com]

Another tick on your wall for instruments learned... I'll have to look into Tub. I used to like accordion in folk-rock in the UK.

Mum (electronica) use accordion, but they also use saws, and various odd instruments I've never seen or heard of. So I don't know how interesting this is. They're better live than on CD, it turned out.

Re: cool

[jfb.livejournal.com]

On Friday I was thinking about seeing Matmos, but opted for a second Mulvey show after listening to MP3s (http://www.brainwashed.com/matmos/news.html) of Matmos playing things like "Small bells, tuning forks, shortwave, effects, samplers, contact microphones, a harp, toy motors, pieces of metal, and an ultrasound bat detector." Interesting stuff, but I guess I wasn't in the mood for interesting.

I expect I will never learn to play the saw.