Am I making a mistake? Now that I’m back to blogging people are going to begin to expect it. At least today is easy, I did something fun yesterday, I went to see Charming Disaster at a new venue, Umbra in Bushwick. Umbra means shadow so it’s an appropriate place for a Goth Folk band that as you can see from the pictures, is quite dark. I think this is only my third time seeing them in person, which is not enough. I have a need to see them more than most musicians because there’s nobody similar to them to fulfill their space in my musical eco system. If you were to map all musical acts as dots in space there would be clusters, some dense but with plenty of points between the clusters and the density decreasing as you get further from the nodes. Charming disaster would be a dot all by itself far off from everyone else. Or to put it another way, Charming disaster and I have a lot in common with Lydia.
Ellia even shops at the same stores. Jeff shops in the Men’s department. They sing about everyday things like the similarities between living in a house with carbon monoxide and living in a haunted house. Another song is about Paris green, a pigment that contains arsenic. I know it from some movie or TV show I saw as a kid when someone is murdered by wallpaper colored by Paris green. I had no idea that it wasn’t something that everybody knows about for years. Yeah, Charming Disaster was created in lab for me. I’m sure the lab assistant’s name was Igor (pronounced eye-gore). Each show is not just songs and banter, they are stage presentations. The last one was in the form of a séance, last night’s was guided by chance and fate. They have a set of special tarot cards, with their songs on them. There are also standard tarot cards in the pack to represent new songs that don’t have cards yet. Members from the audience choose the card and they play the song the card represents. Setlists are for the boring.
The thing that speaks best to how highly I think of Charming Disaster is that I missed a gathering of the tribe. Many of my music friends were at a show by a musician friend, at a series curated by friends at a venue owned by a friend. I LOVE things like that. It kills me to miss it, but it would kill me more to miss CD. Many of my friends were there but not all, Kevin came to this show with me. Kevin and I have a lot of artists in common and they end to be somewhat disjoint from the musicians my usual crowd follows. His education, career, and lifestyle are also unlike most of my friends. This was a march to the beat of a different drummer night.
I took a video but haven’t gotten clearance from the band to post it yet. I can show you the pictures. Not only am I back to blogging I’m also getting back into taking pictures and videos.
The venue was odd, there were were two stages with a space between them. They did the show on house right. After they went into the audience Ellia went to the house left stage. After song there she rejoined Jeff. I called it a trial separation
I think I figured out what to write about tomorrow. There will be at least one Muppet involved.
Wise Madness 