Star Man!
On Friday May 8th, 2015 Geelong City Council put on an event called “Geelong After Dark”. They invited local artist of all types and styles to present their work in the CBD in an attempt to attract the residence of Geelong out into the streets to experience a bit of festivity and culture. They were successful in that attempt.
The event was well attended and many people spoke of how much they had enjoyed the art and the wonderful festive atmosphere of Geelong that night.
I was honoured to have been invited to perform in this event and strove to present something that the public had never seen from me before.
What I did was wrap myself in fairy lights and played improvised slide guitar music for an hour solid. I did not stop playing for the entire hour except for a few seconds once to swap guitars.
The instruments I used were a hand built electric lap steel guitar built by myself out of a beautiful piece of Maple and my trusty Regal Black Lightning Square Neck Resonator. I played them through my new Vox CCII-TV amp and it sounded AMAZING!
The performance started with a recording of the Indian Tamboura drone instrument in the key of D, (which continued underneath my playing for the whole hour). That set the tone for me to be able to enter a fairly meditative state and then improvise soundscapes and atmospheric music which rolled through dynamic waves of emotion and sometimes confusion.
I really relished the opportunity to loose myself in the music, so much so that at times I forgot that I was even in a public forum. I occasionally would drift back to reality and look up and there was this huge crowd of people standing there listening and taking photos and videos of the performance.
Someone said to me after that I should have stopped so that the crowd could applaud…but that wasn’t really what it was all about for me that night. I was merely an art installation of sound and light. I wasn’t playing songs, (though I did occasionally lend from a few of the better slide guitar riffs I have written).
Thanks to UP Creative who took these beautiful photos.
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