the world has turned and left me here

mice parade plus pent-up digression on the production of music

[Pre Facto] Going to see Mice Parade tonight...interested to see how Adam Pierce pulls everything off live. If sufficiently motivated I'll update with a review.

[Post Facto] ...and the answer is: with 7 other people (!!!). For some reason I thought he would perform everything himself and loop it. Now I realize how insanely impossible that would be. The stage was bursting with too many instruments to detail here; when in full throttle, the frequency spectrum was saturated...you couldn't have crammed in any more sound if you tried.

So Mice Parade is a sort of mini-orchestra. Of course, blending all these instruments together presents quite a mixing challenge, and you're right if you guessed they wouldn't leave that part to chance: they bring their own mixer guy. I count him as one of the 8 band members, since this is no trivial job. He's right on stage with the rest of them.

But what would an orchestra be without its conductor? This is of course Adam Pierce. Mice Parade (anagram of his name) was originally a solo project of Pierce's, who is by trade a drummer, but apparently plays everything under the sun. Just like your high school band teacher...

For the first half of the concert he played an acoustic guitar, center stage, sang some of the vocals, and drummed on a box he was sitting on. There was a nice little back and forth session between Adam and the drummer that seemed to have been improvised. The rest of the band, on the other hand, didn't seem to enjoy the same peer-to-peer relationship, and mostly took cues from Adam. Or sometimes they took shouted directions, even the occasional piercing (no pun intended) glances thrown across stage in order to correct some bit of instrumentation he wasn't happy with.

The result of all this was that you felt a little bit like you were watching these guys through the control room window, instead of sharing the live concert experience. I'm not saying this is all bad; it's definitely neat to see how musicians work and all. And I caught them relatively early in their current tour so I guess they're still working some kinks out. Okay. But...if you happen to live in Austin, TX (currently the last stop on their tour), you should go see them and tell me if it's any different.

I'm guessing it won't be. Because it all comes down to the fact that (a) Adam Pierce is a perfectionist type and (b) these are other people playing his music.

These days, I derive much less pleasure from seeing song-based, improv-light bands play live than I used to. I remember going to Weezer concerts and belting out all the lyrics and loving every moment of it...the closer they approximated the album, the better. A few words addressed to the crowd between songs were enough variation for me back then, as when Thom Yorke announced, "This song is about the future," and launched into Pyramid Song. Musically, there was little deviation from what I'd previously heard, but it still blew my mind. That doesn't seem to happen to me anymore.

To summarize before I digress again (I want to digress again), Mice Parade makes great albums-- go buy them--but seeing them live is unfortunately no big revelation, and in fact may annoy you a little bit, depending on how much you're still affected by "the magic."

Digression resumed: did you just hear that? I encouraged you to go buy something. That seems a little effed up to me given what I'm going to say. This is really what it comes down to: the song is a product in musical form.

Ditto with albums. As usual, we're dealing with the old assembly line approach to things, or what Burroughs calls "the cancer model of production," implying that the process itself of making and distributing copies quickly gets out of control. Apply the idea to music and you get top 40 radio playing and replaying and re-replaying the same exact thing with no variation, and you get your favorite album which is perfectly and reassuringly identical every time you pop it in. Replication.

Now think back to your first concert-going experience and ask yourself if you weren't disappointed that the band didn't play the songs exactly the same way that you were used to? I know I was. Every deviation seemed like a mistake, it's as if I'd gotten a G.I. Joe with a cosmetic defect and I wanted my money back. Or if not that, then at least store credit, so I could exchange it for one just like everyone else had.

Anyway, I suppose eventually the whole model starts to bore you and you want something else. If you feel like you may be getting to this point, do yourself a favor, go see a good jazz show, or someone who's willing to improvise. The moment it hits you that what you're hearing was not carefully scripted beforehand and replicated infinitely, you're forever changed. You realize the real value of music not as a product but as a service--no, as an experience, i.e. something that will never happen again like this.

Your experience has no resell value. You can't turn it back into a material good like the money that you perhaps paid for it. And even if you tried, people would probably say "what is this crap? that's my favorite song and you just totally messed it up." :)