My Bands/ Other Families

I'm sitting here waiting for band to arrive, so I thought I'd write about my bands

Lets start with the one that has a name: Paint.
This started out as a jam band with Nelius Nortje & Mojo Barnardt. We'd just get together every week during December and make some pretty sounds. We named it in february and we started gigging 2 weeks ago. So far we have concluded our genre is "Progressive Art Pop". The music is pretty, light-hearted, catchy, but a lil' bit out there! Nelius does most of the writing. He is a fantastic song writer!! Mojo plays on this lovely Yamaha Custom electric kit (Yes... I can hear the groans from you traditional drummers - but who else can change their kit at the turn of a knob?! )

What's been great about jamming with these 2, is that we've decided to see the band as a learning device. Nelius is taking the role of frontman & vocalist (a change from his backup vocals position in The Paradigm) , Mojo is getting thrown some interesting time signatures, and Nelius is teaching me bits of the jazz theory he has been learning in his course as well as teaching me to sing (... :/)

So far so good! Last night we played with Cortina Whiplash and I think that was by far out tightest show. We got another gig on Tuesday at Tanz Cafe! Cant wait
Also, we should be recording this week on Wednesday. Should be fun & relatively painless!

Next Band:
...
Ok... So we dont have a name yet. We haven't had a name for 6 months!

It consists of Dmittri Zyrianov (Drums), Kaz Le Bihan (Guitar) & I. At the core, we are an experimental band & are currently going through a big math rock phase! (think Don Cabellero & Tera Melos). Kaz writes just about everything. He is insane - In EVERY connotation of the word. Absolute genius! I'm so privelaged to play with him. I've been jamming with Kaz for about 6 years now and I can gladly say we get each other and long ago was adopted as my brother!
After the disbandment of Alarmhouse, Kaz and I were in desperate need for a drummer. We asked around and this quickly lead us to this Russian chap with some serious style. Dmittri was a Goldmine! He SOMEHOW caught onto Kaz's extremely unique and time-signature intensive style of writing.

Typical Band Writing Scenario (for lolz)
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Kaz: Hey guys, I want you guys to take a listen to this.
*plays intricate guitar piece*
Dma: Woah AWESOME *starts jamming*
Jade: Woah AWESOME *starts counting excitedly*
*repeats piece 12 times so everyone can catch on*
Jade: ... Kaz, you do realise you have written this in 13/8 which changes to a 7/4 for 2 bars and then counts out the Fibonnacci sequence from 7th term backwards.
Kaz: What?
Jade: Just play it. Dma's caught on anyway.
Both in unison: ok.
*We jam*

I get bored with 4/4 (Paint is trying to teach me otherwise...baby steps ;) ). The music Kaz writes is complex, noisy and I love it. LOVE it! It enjoy the challenges that it poses when counting out the time signatures, writing interesting bass lines to fit the multilayered guitar loops and just feeling how a tune with 20 different parts eventually (after days of practice) converges into a single song. (We generally have to record our stuff to remember the structure)

I guess the only problem is that it does literally take days to write songs and we are all busy people and even with our constant commitment it is just taking us ages to write. Slowly but surely we are getting there. One day when we have our set DOWN we are going to blow everyone's brains out.

Also, one day we will also settle of a band name! I'll post an entry as soon as we have decided

Next blog entry: Something Geeky.