Lu Wan Rock

originally posted may 23

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last night was the second last show on a two month tour that the carsick cars have been undertaking with the gar. they were stellar at d-22 in beijing on may 1st , and they were no different at yuyintang last night. what can i say – if you haven’t heard them yet you really should listen to them . they owe a lot of their sound and style to sonic youth, i guess. it’s slightly poppier but still very aggressive.

the crowd was really into it and they went into overdrive for the last song of the encore – zhong nan hai. again, cigarettes sailed across the room and made a nice addition to my photo of shouwang’s pedals:

first in the chain is the all important boss tuner . this is the white one at the bottom left. it’s crucial to stay in tune on stage. and i think he uses alternate tunings – you gotta stay on top of that. next is the green rocktron short timer retro delay . this is an echo unit for short, slapback style delays. the brown one is the b oss OC-3 super octave pedal . this adds extra octaves below what you actually play, basically making your sound super fat and bassy. the orange mxr phase 90 makes a swooshy phaser sound. the mxr blue box octave/fuzz is like an octave pedal and a distortion pedal all in one. mxr make some good looking boxes but this one seems redundant here unless it has a really special sound that he uses it for. and we have another fan of the rat . this time it’s the proco turbo rat . dirty is all i can say. next it gets even dirtier : the electroharmonix double muff distortion pedal. how much distortion can one man use? last one in the chain at the top of the photo is the boss RC-20 XL loop station . the end is a very good place for this one – it can capture everything he plays and he can play it back at will.

nice vox and sg.

i don’t know what happened here. but i don’t think this bass will work again.

i once mentioned the proximity of the traffic to the door of yuyintang. regardless of the danger, street life took on a new life last night for this big show. there was a well stocked bbq and a cigarette vendor camped out on the side of the road.