Typhoon in Kyushu

I'm stuck in Kokura, Kyushu right now and we're weathering the worst typhoon of the year. Huge gusty winds shook the traditional dark wood building I spent the night in, and now the streets are flooded, turning taxis into boats. I'm back at Soap Gallery now, scene of last night's show. There isn't much to do but sit here and wait for the local and shinkansen train services to resume. Even this office I'm sitting in doesn't feel safe; I can hear water dripping through the roof onto a tarpaulin skin draped directly above the iMac I'm sitting at, and little spiders are scuttling across the tabletop. The typhooon map suggests that things will be better tomorrow. I certainly hope so; I have to catch a flight to Hong Kong on Wednesday from Kansai International.

Last night's show was pretty great. First there was a group called Lolo. Three yukata-clad girls played two pieces. The first was like Neu's 'Fur Immer', a repetitive drone with motorik drumkit, shamisen and a violin held upright and bowed like a cello. The second piece was like a school recorder exercise, a woodwind trio piece with some slightly sinister electronic effects casting a shadow across its scholastic cuteness. When I spoke to the girls later, they said their influence wasn't from 70s German electronica but from traditional Japanese theatre music; kyogen and bunraku.

Then came DoraVideo, with some of the most inventive use of Max/MSP I've seen. DoraVideo is a drummer who looks a bit like a sumo wrestler. His drumkit triggers Max manipulations of digital video projected on a big screen behind him. In this way he controls various short video sequences -- a clip from a samurai movie murder, the shower scene from 'Psycho', himself playing the drums, clips from Hong Kong ganster movies, a Chinese folk orchestra. It's basically live video scratching controlled by a drumkit instead of a shuttle wheel. A cymbal crash can spin the heads back, a snare advances the scene in real time to the next marker point. It's powerful and makes me think that Max used with video in this way could be the second big stage of the sampling revolution started in the 80s with Emulators and Akais.

My own show also saw me using the video projector, this time to play along, manually and in real time, adding a very visual layer of chaotic, atonal virtual instruments to my iTunes backing tracks. I loaded up the Harry Partch Flash instruments I downloaded last week (the link is in an old entry, and I can tell you that saving the Flash files wasn't easy). So when I wasn't singing I was playing, or rather puppet-playing, these weird zithery slides and boings courtesy of Harry and the Flash programmers who virtualised his amazing constructions. These instruments, projected big on a wall, are great for live shows; when you trigger them, you see, for instance, a marimba player moving to strike the notes you're playing with keyboard keys. It's a sort of iBook bunraku.

I'll post some photos of the show when I get back to civilisation. The whole show was captured on video by my friend Graham from Nottingham University, who tells me he'll be making a DVD of it at some point.