Luggage Store Gallery

The Luggage Store Gallery is across the street from the Golden Gate Theater, where Hairspray is currently being performed. It's on Market Street at 6th Street, which is a rather, uh, intense neighborhood. Despite this, the gallery has been doing really well.

The gallery itself is up at the top of a steep double flight of stairs and musicians perform at the street end of the space in front of a row of tall windows. Organizers Rent Romus and Matt Davignon told me that normally, there's a big velvet curtain hanging in front of the windows, but that it was taken down recently and they don't know why. They hope it's coming back, since it helps make the space less live, and Rent has a noise show booked for the very near future.

Anyway, Zeke Talbot played first on detuned and prepared guitar, with some looping going on and singing along. He had something very haunting and disturbing going on, like a serial killer in a scary indie film, that I really appreciated. I went next along with Will and Jim, and Peter Nyboer was last with his laptop music. He also did a turntable improvisation that I really liked. We all had the street light and the Golden Gate Theater marquis in the background. Rent told me that he was grateful one of the two street lights was burnt out, because last time they had both been shining in behind the performers and that it was pretty blinding.

Celeste was there with a DAT recorder with which she recorded our set. She'll be transferring it to CD and I really hope it comes out well, because the music felt and sounded really good while we were doing it. You never know though if it will come across in a recording.

In other news Ben McAllister has posted sound files, photos, and commentary from Big Sur on his web site. You can see it at http://www.listenfaster.com/bigsur.shtml.

In other and even better news, I've been awarded a grant from the American Composers Forum's Subito fund. It will help me make my upcoming fourth CD, Not Made of Stone.