friday night was great, but maybe a touch too long given the limited expressive nature of the style that has come to be known as post-rock. the three bands playing, hualun (wuhan), sugar plum ferry (taiwan) and mono (japan) are all masters of the loud/soft dichotomy. they conjure great melodies which they can play both with aggression and gentleness. all the musicians on friday played with great taste and a nice feel for the drama of it all. in retrospect, i think a band like mono could easily be supported by bands of slightly varying styles – maybe some vocals, maybe a cello or a violin. maybe some more vocals? anyway, i was pretty impressed with all the music that night.
the sound of post-rock is well described in this here wikipedia entry:
Post-rock compositions often make use of repetition of musical motifs and subtle changes with an extremely wide range of dynamics. Typically, post-rock pieces are lengthy and instrumental, containing repetitive build-ups of timbre, dynamics and texture.
the one thing they forgot to add is the liberal use of delay by post-rock practitioners. they have short delays, long delays, trippy tape-style delays. i didn’t hear too much slap-back, i guess that’s more pre-rock.
the faceless mono member on the right of the stage was rocking five different delay pedals and a few other goodies. let’s check it out – on the bottom left of the photo below is the good ol’ boss TU-2 tuner as used by pretty much everyone. it then plugs into the white, three-knob pedal below it – the boss LS-2 line selector pedal. this little gem lets you set up two distinct effect chains to create two totally different sounds which you can switch between at the touch of a foot. across the bottom (closest to the chair) we can see the first chain – first up is the grey boss RV-3 reverb/delay pedal followed by a danelectro fab-tone, bringer of warm overdrive. then into the silver coloured boss DD-3 delay and a big black volume pedal. strangely, this then goes into another LS-2 line selector. the top chain seems to be quite similar – first up is the boss RV-5 reverb pedal followed by red SIB mr echo which features the SLAM pedal – when engaged it ramps the pedal’s feedback to maximum and the delay time to very short. wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! after this is another DD-3 and then the blue boss PS-2 pitch shifter/delay pedal. and it looks like a boss RC-20 loop station off to the right there. did you see that?- five delay pedals. ok – so one of them can also be used for pitch shift, and another can be used for reverb… but i bet he just used them all as delays. it reminds me a little of strobolight’s setup, though robin had more distortion pedals.
over to the left of stage we can see a similar setup involving two lines but a little more devotion to the art of overdriving. it looks like the LS-2 line selector is the second last pedal on the right with the red and green knobs. chain A across the bottom of the pedal board seems to start with a boss OD-3 overdrive pedal. nice choice, my friend. and next up is our old friend, the proco RAT. another boss delay pedal is next, this time the DD-6, and that goes into another boss RV-5 reverb pedal. surely the next boss DD-3 in the chain is excessive? probably, but who cares? the upper chain B (bottom of the photo) starts with the TU-2 tuner and then it goes into the next pedal on my wishlist – the boss FDR-1 fender deluxe spring reverb modeling pedal. i was just playing through the actual amp over the weekend and it rocks. to have this in a pedal is truly awesome. if it does what is says on the box it can provide lush overdrive, sweet cleans, rich reverb as well as a pretty neat vibrato function which is really a poorly named but great sounding tremolo effect. unless appearances are deceiving, the signal goes from this to what was on top of my list until i saw the previous pedal – a tech21 sansamp GT2 – basically another great amp emulator. i don’t understand why these two are chained together as they more or less do the same thing. it would make more sense to have one in each chain provided by the line selector. perhaps this is the case but the placement of the pedals in the case doesn’t make this obvious. the next one is of course another boss RV-3 reverb/delay pedal. and there’s another RC-20 loop station off to the right but i’m not sure how this is connected.
it looks like these guys have a very organised approach to their sounds. guitarist one would use the chain closest to him for distorted effects and the further chain for clean sounds while guitarist two is more into sculpting his tone and providing lots of subtle texture using his distortion pedals and amp pedals both alone and in different combinations. and why so many delay pedals (eight in total)? because each one can be set so differently to provide a lot of variation in the different delays that go to making their sound so rich. hey, just for kicks, i’d like to hear these guys unplugged. maybe they could jam with edge from U2.
what are the people saying?