Tremendous fun in Oregon – thanks so much to Zinger and Tabitha for the ride back, to Shanti’s mom for hauling us around, to Glastonbury for having us in, to all the people who came to the shows and a zillion people and HI EVERYBODY! if you come up here and say hi!

I’ll post some pictures tomorrow, after we get done unpacking – Minion Paul got some cargo in from Starfleet, apparently. I have no idea what he ordered. But if you’re going to have cargo from and organisation starting with S, I’d rather it be Starfleet than Strexcorp.

Transporter Fully Operational

I’ll be guesting with Leannan Sidhe in May and June, in Oregon and on the Washington dry side. In Oregon in particular we’ll actually just be a duo, which is kind of taking it to extremes, but nobody else in the band is available(!) due to Many Reasons.

Which means doing the little things, like wrapping some picks in fabric so my zouk loses a lot of the high-end harmonics and sounds superficially more like a guitar. I tried felt picks, but they just didn’t feel right, or sound the same. So it’s DIY, ahoy:

Double-sided Tape Solves Many Problems

Wrap in double-sided tape, then fabric, then trim with scissors. Doesn’t actually take long. I’ve used these with Leannan Sidhe before, but not in a while, because normally her guitarists are actually around, and then I don’t need them.

Got some decent mandolin recording last night, on Some for a Free Court/Anarchy Now. Also had some interesting discussion with Anna, whose books these are (and who has a new book out now, by the way) about future timelines and worldbuilding.

I love being on this side of the spoiler wall. Sure, Rebels of Adalonia is getting all the attention right now, but Free Court… this – all of it? It’s gonna be good. 😀

Over on Dreamwidth (and on Livejournal, too), a couple of different people commented about really liking nwcMUSIC this year, despite the fact that a lot of it is not to their specific tastes.

I wanted to elevate one of my responses up to blog top, because it really addresses what I’m trying to do with this show.

We really have two core philosophies here. One, we’re participatory culture. That’s the easy one. Our daytime programme reflects that; we’re mostly workshops, and even our talking-heads panels are about doing things. But that’s not the big idea today.

The big idea is tied into our second core philosophy. It reflects an… the phrase “anti-specialist mindset” is too strong, and misleading, because we like specialists, even if we don’t specialise as a festival. It reflects an intent of intermixing with an agenda.

Let me start from the beginning. Norwescon, historically, was the largest gathering of the geek tribes throughout Cascadia. It’s not the largest geek/fan event anymore, not with PAX and Sakuracon around*, true; but those are specialised events. Norwescon is still, to this day, the largest gathering of all the tribes, bringing in a little bit of everybody.

I want nwcMUSIC to represent that. Not reflexively, not just to fit, either; I have a goal. Not every organisation can generalise, or should try; specialisation isn’t just for insects, sorry. Sometimes it’s valuable. But Norwescon already generalises – Last of the Gencons – so it’s a particularly good place to do what I’m trying to do.

There’s a downside to the smorgasbord, of course; there’s always going to be stuff people categorically don’t like.

But the upside – ah, the upside is that you get this fantastic intermixing and interplay. And then, if the stars are right, you get this communication, this transfer, where people start taking notes about the stuff they like and taking those back to their specialised groups, where you get even more ideas and more creative frission, and it builds, turning into an energy – one we’re finally starting to see.

That Cypher vs. Housefilk: FIGHT! thing was a small, largely-unnoticed breakthough. A tiny panel, on a Sunday afternoon, with a small number of somewhat sleepy people there… and one person in that little audience listed it on Facebook as the highlight of their whole convention. So have a couple of the panelists. Why?

Because it had that energy.

That moment.

That spark.

[insert Agatha Heterodyne laughing manically here]

That’s what I’m going for. A music festival? That’s great. It’s worth doing by itself as a cultural and educational event, absolutely.

But it’s the those moments of lighting that I’m really hoping to trigger. I can’t unleash skyfire on command; it’s too random, too elusive, too chaotic in nature to engineer outright.

But I can sure as hell charge up a room and see what happens.

I don’t just want this thing to be good. I want it to be magic.

*: While certainly larger – and in PAX’s case quite a lot larger – they aren’t as many times larger than us as people think. They issue gate numbers, while we issue membership numbers. People compare them to each other, but that’s wrong; they’re counting totally different things. For example, if one person goes to Sakuracon for three days, that’s three in gate – because gate is person per day – despite being one member.

They didn’t make this system up, it’s traditional for convention-centre and fair events. They aren’t cheating. But as you can see, it’s a wildly different counting system.

If you counted Norwescon in “gate” fashion, it’d be around 11,000 (our gate), rather than 3250 (our membership). I’ve been trying to get the concom to issue gate numbers too, because right now, people are comparing apples to oranges in a way that makes us look smaller than we are. I’d like it if they compared apples to apples – it really matters to some of our pros.

The trophy picture I have for Cascadia’s Got Talent! this year had too bright a background. It made the trophy hard to see as an object. So here’s a version with the background toned down by hand.

Cascadia’s Got a Trophy!

So, yeah! I said yesterday this year was epic; let’s talk about that a little.

This is the first year our daytime workshops are out of exile. We’ve been up in the tower, in Salon, a fine room with a lovely view but which is an elevator ride to somewhere nothing else is happening. Set to Discoverability Factor Zero, Mr. Wesley, and engage. Now we’re back downstairs, with the concerts.

This is also the first year we announced livestreaming of concerts in advance. It was on short notice, because the technical details kept changing, but it was in advance. K built an uplink out of four parallel cellular devices – three LTE, one 4G – multiplexed into a single high-bandwidth channel spread across three entirely separate cellular networks. This was almost as good as a wired connection.

Almost.

This was also the first Electric Night. For a the first three years of nwcMUSIC at Norwescon, Thursday night was Experimental. This year, it became Electric, and we brought in atmospheric room lighting. Not a lot; just enough to paint the walls with colour. Mike Citrak – who I forgot to thank yesterday, I’m sorry Michael! – also lent us some of his dance lights, which definitely helped. The Thursday bands loved it; we’ll need to do more of that.

First up was 9K1, featuring Shubzilla, Lex Lingo, and Bill Beats, who you probably know from Death*Star. Nerdcooooooooooooore:

9k1 Rocks the House
(They have a new video, by the way)

One of the funniest things from my point of view the entire convention was that – okay, opening ceremonies ran late, and we can’t start concerts ’till they’re done. Partly, because it’s not smart, some of them come over to us; second, because respect. So it’s totally cool.

But I still had a crowd to keep entertained and energised, so I decided to screech them in, which is a thing we do at nwcMUSIC, stolen – in idea form, anyway – from screeching in on George Street in St. John’s.

Only since we can’t serve whiskey, we do it with a literal screech.

Now, 9K1 had already set a record for largest draw on a Thursday, and while Thursday is not exactly a huge day, they did really well. And most of their fans showed up on time.

And I had all of them screech at the top of their lungs, all at once, with Opening Ceremonies right across the hall, and with all doors open.

This was hilarious. Unintentionally, of course. I was just trying to keep my crowd in the room. I didn’t even know that I’d made an entire ceremony full of pros jump out of their chairs until a good five minutes later.

It was a good Screech. 😀

Dancing to 9k1

We’d also yanked a bunch of chairs from stage front during setup, as a dance floor. Turns out: bonus points.

Jonny Nero Action Hero was our only chiptunes act this year. To be honest, chiptunes aren’t that popular at Norwescon, which is clearly a failing we’ll have to correct. But he drew a pretty respectable crowd too, and noticing that, we were starting to realise something was up.

He’s also pretty good on guitar, and later, I’d find out, very good on panels.

Jonny Nero Action Hero

Oh, see the little light down on the bottom of the picture? There’re two of them. They’re my stupid little stage lights and I love them.

I’d bought these colour-changing LED bulbs; I’d planned to put them in reflectors aimed at walls. Turned out they were too dim. I’d thought to put them in paper cones so we’d have colour-changing paper cones (critically different! to ordinary paper cones), but instead I stuck them on some snake-neck clamp lights clamped to the scaffolding. Once curled up in front of the stage? Suddenly they really kind of worked. Almost non-ironically worked, even. They’re like the idea of footlights even if you don’t really have footlights.

Klopfenpop rounded out the evening to another pretty good crowd – very good, again, for late on Thursday. He didn’t bring his guitar, but he brought his game:

Klopfenpop

I wasn’t actually on any panels either on Thursday or Friday, beyond my MC duties at all concerts. So I got a look at the art show and dealer’s room in the afternoon, and I have to say, both really interested me this year. I didn’t have the chance to give the art show the time it deserved, but whoever had the animatronic sculptures in back? Well done, artist, well done. Those were cool.

I bought more things in the dealer’s room than usual, because there were more kinds of things than usual. Good show all around.

Next up: The Big Show! With The Heather Dale Band. This is our daytime “event” show – we don’t do it every year – in Grand Ballroom 3. Grand 3 is a huge but freakish room where wifi will fail from device to device in the same room, so you can just guess what that did to our wireless. Still, we got a good capture, and were streaming live most of the show. And the rebroadcast after was perfect.

This is what John’s soundboard looks like in the dark. I’m pretty sure I can blow up Alderaan from here:

Seghers Sound(board)

You can push buttons on it or its touchscreen or a remote tablet and all the actual, physical sliders will move around to different presets. It’s pretty damn awesome.

Grand 3 has the best, most traditional stage, which makes for interesting photography opportunities:

The Best Picture I Got With Ben In It
(Stop hiding in the dark, Ben, it makes you hard to shoot.
I MEAN WITH A CAMERA. I have IR, hiding doesn’t do a damn thing against my weaponry.)

Heather Dale and Betsy Tinney

All Alone in the Dark
(if you ignore the rest of the band, the audience, Babylon 5, and the Internet)

I started doing a Scooter impersonation before this show. “Ms. Dale! Ms. Dale! Three minutes to curtain, Ms. Dale!” This, like many muppet things, became a running gag. (See also: “Ms. Clicks! Ms. Clicks! Three minutes to curtain, Ms. Clicks!” on Saturday.)

After that, it was all load-and-move back up to the Evergreens for Friday Filkfest’s main set of shows. I really have to hand it to John and Jen’s volunteer crew this year, they had that kit wrapped up and shifted like magic.

Friday is Friday Filkfest because filk is the oldest form of geekmusic, going back to the 1950s, and deserves its place in the sun. Besides, I like their DIY/participatory culture attitude. They’re punk in that way – and in perhaps no other way, but that’s a pretty damn good way.

The word “filk” came from a typo in an article – the author meant to write “science-fiction folk music” and that I is awfully close to that O on the keyboard, and hey, who has time to proofread, am I write? – and they ran with it en masse and instantly. And while I couldn’t attend it, I was told by multiple people that the What the Frak is Filk? / Filk 101 panel went over well, with good attendance – and a lot of new people.

A lot of new people. A pattern is emerging, isn’t it?

Oh hey, say Hello to the Future, Friday night’s leadoff.

Hello, the Future!

Hello, the Future! is Nicole Dieker’s band, and she is the only person in her band, but she was certainly not the only person in that room. Friday’s a busy Norwescon night, too, with a lot going on, but she drew ’em in.

Up next: Vixy & Tony. I’d written up a concert description for them consisting entirely of the word “Chicken” repeated many times – yes, I stole the joke, I don’t care – with the phrase, “we can put anything we want here, we know you’ll come” two-thirds of the way through.

I was, of course, correct. But that’s not exactly an amazing mystical prediction, it’s just plain obvious.

Vixy & Tony

BEAT DRUM! BEAT DRUM!

Vixy & Tony & Sunnie & (barely) Betsy…
(…who already got a good picture…)

The funny part is, I’d originally scheduled them as the closer/headline act, with Seanan McGuire (who was also an official Norwescon Guest of Honour) in front of them. But they asked me to switch the two, expecting all of Seanan’s many fans as a writer to show up, and then flood back out as soon as she was off stage. I understand that, and of course agreed, but think their fears were unwarranted.

The Crowd on Friday, or the Stage Right Half of It, Anyway

Which isn’t to say that Seanan didn’t draw quite the crowd herself – she did, almost as many as Vixy & Tony. She’s had several albums out and has won several awards from the Filk community, and people were really thrilled to see her do a show.

Seanan McGuire, with a Totally Different Band

…and having a Totally Different Band made up of Totally Different Vixy & Tony – as they said on stage at the time – probably didn’t hurt anything either.

This was the night the livestream started to pick up good audience, too. The count went from “several” to “tens.” On Saturday, it went up to “dozens…”

…but I’m getting ahead of myself, and this is long enough already. The final part – Part Three, with lots more pictures! – will appear tomorrow.

This was a triumph; I’m making a note here: huge success.

nwcMUSIC 2014 at Norwescon 37 is over. Norwescon as a whole ended at 5pm, at the end of Closing Ceremonies; thanks to the wonder of streaming concert video and interviews, nwcMUSIC kept the torch burning until 10:30pm. (To wit: Norwescon is not over until nwcMUSIC says it’s over! XD )

I’m home, I’m pretty darned wiped out, and I want to do it again tomorrow.

I’m kind of high on the endorphin rush right now, to be honest. It’s awesome. I don’t even know where to start. Concerts and workshops and panels all set records, and I don’t even know how to even.

So I’ll give it a day, to settle, and today, I’ll thank my staff. Thanks to John Seghers and Jen Kilmer, whose sound support these last years have made this project possible, and to their volunteer staff, who made all the hauling and setup and takedown so much easier.

nwcMUSIC Sound Control

Thanks to Anna, the Water Fairy, our one-elf staff support. Thanks to K Wiley whose Fan Supported Network livestreams of our concert programme were epic and brought nwcMUSIC shows to hundreds of people who couldn’t’ve seen it otherwise.

K at work

Thanks to Kathleen Troyer, who was ghosting me this year so someone other than me knows how this works, and who took notes for me at meetings I couldn’t attend thanks to eye surgery. Thanks to Doug and Pat Booze, who let our performers put their CDs in their art show print shop, letting us finally have full-time CD sales for our musicians, and Amy Gembala at Norwescon Dealers, who put two and two together to make that connection.

And, of course, thanks to all of our music pros – performing and not – who put in their time and effort and excitement and enthusiasm to make this event come off so well this year. And to everyone who came to shows, who came to panels, who watched via the internet. Thank you.

The Doubleclicks at SRO

But right now, I need to go to bed. G’night!

eta: And bonus points to Michael Citrak, who I accidentally left out before, for lighting assistance! Thanks, Mike!

If you’re looking for the Kitting Out Cheap handout from the Home Recording panels, here y’go. If you have no idea what I’m on about: it’s five pages of information and tips on building a small home recording studio. I’ll do/I’ll have done panel on it on Sunday. Grab a copy if you like, it’s useful even without the panel it goes with.

If you’re looking for the concert livestreaming schedule and details, you’re in the right place! Lots and lots of concerts will be livestreamed at this link for your enjoyment! If you are on-site, don’t watch the stream – go up to Evergreen 1&2 and watch live! But if you can’t attend, here’s where you can go to watch. And throw K a few bucks, eh?

That’s all for now. I may and may not post here during the events, but I’ll certainly be active on Twitter.

I almost forgot! You like show posters, right? Of course you do. We have three. Here’s a picture of one, and they’re all downloadable for your posting-at-your-workplace pleasure.

Electric Night

PDFs: Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Remember, most or maybe even all of these will be livestreamed free, so you can watch even if you can’t attend in person. I can understand that. So much supervillainy in one place can be intimidating. We like it that way.

Met with Shanti last night for a decision-making demi-rehearsal – I’m going to be filling in again for them in a few shows this summer. I already know most of the material, again, and while there are a couple of new additions, they’re quite simple to play, so yay! Easy work. I’ll announce dates when I have time to look them up, but the first shows will be in Oregon, in May.

Everything else is Norwescon. Hey, look, I made a gong! It’s an ornamental tray, really, but it sounds kinda good. In fact, it’s right at that quality point where you think, “Y’know, I could use this on a recording,” before you realise it isn’t actually that good. But still, that’s a quality point, and is pretty damn good for a Can$5 thrift store find in Victoria.

The real reason I’m building it, of course, is Cascadia’s Got Talent!, our kitschy talent show on Saturday. We had a serving-tray-gong already, and I’m very thankful for Jordan for making it, but it was kind of low to the ground and not as obvious behind the judges. This one… will be obvious. HEY LOOK WE HAVE PROPS!

Okay, a prop. Still.

The giant frame breaks down for transport. This isn’t a picture of that, broken down; it’s the three vinyl-banner frames I made in earlier years. But they look remarkably similar, go fig.

Makes 3 banner holders, just add FORCE.

I need some way to label the pipe segments that isn’t visible once the frame is assembled. This year I’m just using clear tape (which I’ll remove after assembly) but that’s a pain because I’ll have to relabel it after every disassembly. There must be some way. Anybody got ideas?

Remember the data I promised couple of days ago, when talking about K Wiley livestreaming the nwcMUSIC concert programming at Norwescon? It’s here!

Looks like we’re gonna need this!

First: a more specific streaming schedule! The Doubleclicks? YES! Hello, The Future!? YES! Vixy & Tony? YES! More: YES!

This schedule is incomplete and I know for a fact some of those TBDs are going to turn into YESes, but I can’t say who until it’s formalised. So keep checking Fan Supported for an updated list.

Second: A few of you have helped get K’s bandwidth expenses close to defrayed! You are super awesome. He’s hoping to go beyond that and get ahold of some extra equipment, so if you’re interested in helping and haven’t yet, go check his page. There are plenty of details and some rewards for people who help.

I bet you can guess what I’ll be doing the next couple of days – finally seeing Winter Soldier, that’s what. WOOHOO! Oh, and, okay, fine, doing some nwcMUSIC stuff too, I guess. XD Got any plans for the weekend?