I'm back from Cwm To The Valley!
Wow! That was a brilliant three days. We camped in a forest that rapidly turned into tent city. The weather was mild to hot. The music was excellent - all good, from the tape loop and interpretive dance duo to the classical singer and violinist to the dronal noise merchants to the foot-stomping rock, something around twenty five or so acts, all very different to one another, and all from people who are in it just for the music. The audience of musicians and their friends and families were receptive and appreciative. Wonderful.
As for my bit. Everything that could go wrong did. Ninki V couldn't make it. But there was Peter Knight to the rescue - I had met him previously at Songbird. Maya made friends with him the first day (before I pointed him out to her) on Saturday he told her he had his theremin with him. So he was recruited on the spot. We spent the Sunday morning learning techniques and rehearsing and were good to go.
Come the night I switched my Kees on a couple of hours before time - it needs about 15 minutes to stabilise - and moved it to one side. Of course, with four acts before me moving stuff around the inevitable happened and the cable came out. This was outdoors, at night, under a large open tent. It was cold. I had recently trimmed the theremin to handle a few particularly hot days that had stopped it working. It stopped working. So Peter to the rescue again, and suddenly I was a solo act with a borrowed etherwave and the audience were looking at me expectantly. (About two hundred - while we were setting up everyone currently around the bonfire had wandered over to join those already in the tent after hearing the announcement that a theremin act was coming.)
I felt calm, confident and in control. That the first piece was an homage to The Clangers was appreciated. The lasso d'amores worked well with Beneath the Cavern of the Soup Dragon. It was fun to play and light hearted, and a nice warmup piece, just running though my paces, ready for my melodic piece, which as I announced as "a cybernetic love song" and decided was called "In The Potting Shed". And, Hey! I hit every note. My last piece, The Plummeting Man, didn't quite work for me as a solo piece - as Peter suggested later, a pedal that would let me sample myself would be useful, but the audience applauded just as loudly. I walked off the stage about six inches off the ground and buzzing with pleasure. And then my knees gave way under me.
So I retired to the quiet of Bubble Pirate Steve's chill out zone (BPS is the perfect aging bearded hippy. Laura adored him. His pad was decorated in the style of Barbarella's space ship.) and sat by the brazier shivering with excitement and exhaustion. For a while I relaxed and listened to the same old pseudo-intellectual conversation about consciousness and suchlike that I first came across at college parties. My favourite is when they get to amateur theoretical physics. I joined in that bit. It was that sort of weekend.
The next day and people said nice things to me about my playing. Which was lovely too.
I take back my comment about not overly liking the sound of the etherwave. At concert volume it is amazing. The guy at the mixing desk added a nice little bit of reverb for me and the sound totally filled the packed tent like a physical thing. And given that the sound of a theremin travels, (when we had been rehearsing quietly that morning, people had wandered down from fairly distant tents because they recognised the sound) it could easily have been filling the entire valley.
Plus, having now field tested an etherwave, I understand the differences between it and my Kees. The Kees is a wonderful machine for learning and home usage. It has a delightful soft tone that works well at low volumes, and has a linearity very similar to the etherwave. The bass notes notes are a bit fuzzy, do not sound as good as the etherwave, so has a sh
