I've been listening to last sundays performance. Churning over the things Mark (Tallon) and I talked about afterwards. Grimacing a little over the comment someone made about us being a "dance band". Remembering the madness of the Republika gig... wondering whether I've been going about this the wrong way, or perhaps I had to go through this to get to some other way of doing these pieces...

There are pieces that work as they are: "Overhead Obscurity", "Border Song", "Space Radio", "Son of Science". But the breaks in between, as Mark pointed out, are some what of a let down. What with technical problems, uncertain situations, etc, I'm thinking we ought to re-build the set from the ground up... I'm thinking of:

A SOS set is of a sequence of events comprised of all the key components of each unique composition. But instead of a bunch of individual songs/pieces/compositions, they are PERFORMED as a single experience. It's not a novel idea by any means... however, doing it SOS will be quite an undertaking given time signature changes, for instance.

The idea is the ensure that Steve and I have everything we need in a single file. Anything else we need ought to be external to our computers. I'm thinking more along the lines of what Johns built - an entire environment that contains the essence of SOS, that we can navigate in any direction so long as we all know where we're going.

That is, we build, as Steve does so well, a continuum, a flow between here and there, that represents everything that is SOS, but is completely and utterly different to anything we might release.

Am i making sense here? If i am, if means A LOT OF WORK. A lot of work for all of us. John's pretty much there, but Steve and i will have to visit each piece and pull the core components into a single, manageable Ableton Live file that we share, that we add our own personality to and so on.

Mark is important to this process as he has a great sense of "the build" as does steve... both Mark and i have a strong sense of theatre, some thing of the absurd, that brings another element into all this too... i don't want to lose the ability to do pieces like "Die Like a Tourist" and the others that are growing anxious in the wings, but the way we're doing things now, i have to admit, ain't cutting it.

Last Sunday's set taught me a lot. some of it was messy. some if it was brilliant. but overall, it still has balls, it has its own voice and aesthetic, and it has us...

If i/we can't make this work, I'll happily confine myself to home recordings and the occasional performance within the comfort of Gorecore. The rest? Well, I don't want to head that way just yet... got too much fight in me left.