There's a huge gap between the last ticket for Sigur Ros in 2002 and this one in 2006 for Lady Sovereign, but that fact shouldn't be used to conclude that I stopped going to shows for four years. For reasons I'm still not clear on, I stopped collecting tickets from shows in 2002 and it didn't occur to me to save them again until 2006. During this time, I'm sure that I saw Clutch, Meat Beat Manifesto, Mogwai, Mono, Low, Grandmaster Flash, and Sigur Ros a second time. Thankfully, I came to my senses when I went to see the five foot wonder, Lady Sovereign.

The DJ that opened the show was playing a weird mix that went from old school Prodigy to hot off the press dubstep dubplates, and it was a great way to warm up for the SOV. Lady Sovereign's vocal style is unique and her rhymes are funny, but the thing that pushes her over the edge for me is her production. Sure, her big label follow up to the much smaller debut wimped out on a lot of the weirder bass and rhythms that she started with, but it still gave us "Love me or Hate me" which is an absolute classic.

Make no mistake, Lady Sovereign is really only 5'1", but when she takes the stage, she commands it. She was nursing a cold when we saw her, but she still jumped all around hyping people up and yelling most of the lyrics to her songs. She's got a huge amount of charisma and it all comes through in the way she has carried herself in a world where a short white woman is not usually a star. Since this show I've not heard much at all about her. Like most flashes in a pan, she's probably burned through whatever hipster credit she got and the people from this show have likely moved on to something else. But she's a real talent and a great performer, so I hope to see her doing something else again soon.

Every once in a while, I hope that a show is going to be transcendent. I put aside all of my jaded history of seeing bands, playing shows myself, and of being disappointed by artists that I really admire, and I just walk into a building hoping to be carried off the Earthly plane. There are only certain bands through which an experience like this is even possible, and usually when I hope for it, everything falls through. With Sigur Ros in 2002, still just ahead of the curve of their popularity, it seemed like I might just have a shot.

Sigur Ros makes music that wants to be transcendent. They are almost incapable of playing in the middle--everything is either tiny and emotionally compact or huge and sweeping and bombastic. I love that, and that's exactly what usually makes for a good show. The other component of a good show is a good venue, one where the sound and ambience fit the band and Variety Playhouse seemed like a good choice for Sigur Ros. Alas, my plans for a night of exceptional connection to music were foiled by the seating plan.

While the Variety Playhouse has seating, there's a standing room space in front of all of the theater seats that typically gets swollen with younger fans who want to be close to the band. After doing this for a while, I'm quite content to be back a ways, in the middle of the room where I can hear everything perfectly and see everything just well enough. I also like sitting down, especially for a band like Sigur Ros, where I'm not going to be inspired to dance or jump around as much as close my eyes and sway.

The problem with this arrangement at Variety is that when the standing room fills up, the first 15 or so rows of seats are farily useless because the room isn't sloped enough for people sitting to see over those who are standing. So people stand at their seats in the first row. Then the second. Then the third, because really, how can you see through people standing at their seats in rows one and two? This effect fans back like a slow-motion version of the wave, but where people never sit back down to let the wave ebb. When this happens, I want to stop the show and just ask if people can figure out that the seats are for sitting and the standing is for standing--but of course that would never work. So I managed to watch most of Sigur Ros with my head cranked sideways as I peered through the gap in between some guy's arm and his torso, and around someone else's head. I think I saw mostly the drummer.

So after waiting for that once in a lifetime experience and watching it fall flat through the fidgety body parts of others, I decided that maybe transcendent concert experiences weren't for me anymore. If Sigur Ros couldn't do it, and if Cocteau Twins couldn't do it, then what hope was there? Some years later, I would see a movie about a band that came close to the effect I was looking for, so I can at least say now that all hope is not lost. It's just not likely to be found on the floor of the Variety Playhouse.

I didn't think that Negativland was going to be much of a live band. I loved the documentary Sonic Outlaws that spent a lot of its running time profiling the copyright pranks and illegal art that Negativland does so well, but none of that seemed like something you would go to a club to see on a stage. I loved what they did with "The Letter U and the Numeral 2" but again, would it really translate to a performance?

Happily, the answer was a resounding YES. Negativland not only won me over with unfamiliar material, they did so in style. The campy, psychadelic songs have never been my favorite part of their repoitoire, but even those were somehow charming in person. What they did with a mid-show puppet theater act was silly and adventurous and I loved it, but when they ended the show with a song where they ran film through a projector, stopping it long enough to melt and burn each frame as it passed in front of the bulb, I was in awe. It took a few minutes for me to figure out what they were doing because I was so interested in how it looked on stage. When I started to smell the burning celluloid, I looked over and saw someone purposefully creating a huge plume of smoke from melted film stock and I fell in love with the whole thing.

Negativland informed a lot of what I have tried to do over the years. A respect for their pioneering use of found sound and abusive copyright infringement to make a point can certainly be seen in my own work. Negativland (along with bands like Meat Beat Manifesto and Pop Will Eat Itself) helped me to forge an understanding of reappropriation as a creative choice rather than just a lazy endeavor. They also helped to solidify for me the importance of making all of that culture mashup entertaining in some way, so that it didn't seem like an academic exercise in musical diction or sound collage. Negativland not only had ideas behind their work, they also knew what would make people laugh and think and what would make people want to go home and start cutting up vhs tapes or audio files.

In the digital age, an act like Negativland is almost quaint. Culturejamming and sampling and mashups of every conceivable type have become some commonplace that there are more cultural references in an average episode of Family Guy than there were in many early works of sample/cut-up collage music. Of course most of what makes it to an audience is still mundane or obvious or without any point other than to be funny for a moment, the fact remains that a new generation of kids raised on home-made YouTube parodies are not likely to get what was so magical about Negativland doing what they did the old fashioned way.

I never realized that Soul Coughing had become a well-known entity. I picked up on them around the time of "Super Bon-Bon" because that song was catchy as hell and because they had this interesting approach to pop music that was almost like a jazz quartet influenced by drum n bass who replaced the horns with a sampler. In fact, I was explaining how Soul Coughing worked to someone the other day and I was reminded of how amazing it was to see a group that relied on samples for a lot of the sound, but where the guy playing the samples was just a part of the band who had to be good at playing the samples and not just good at pressing the spacebar on a laptop. I liken what that guy was doing to someone like Kid Koala who takes pre-recorded sound and makes something entirely new with it right in front of your eyes. I perform electronic music all the time, but it's no secret that what I and what most people who perform with computers are doing is maniupulating the sounds, not triggering them in real time with the dexterity of an instrumentalist.

Of course someone with a laptop somewhere is throwing his hands up about to complain that I'm saying that there is no art to playing with a laptop, and no skill--that's not it at all. I take what I do very seriously, but at the same time I moved away from the 'how well can I trigger the sounds at the right times' model to the 'how well can I influence and mix and change the sounds in real time' model, which seems to work better for me.

The Soul Coughing guy though used his MIDI controller and his Akai sampler the same way some other person might have used a sax, guitar, or drumkit, and I found that really exciting. I wasn't sure why the Masquarade was so packed with people to see a band that I thought was my own little indulgence, but I was glad to see that a band doing something like that was getting some attention. They broke up not too long after that tour and Mike Doughty went on to make some solo records, but that configuration didn't have the same appeal for me.

I don't remember buying a ticket for this, I only remember thinking that Underwater should have opened the show. I'm trying to recall a Hooverphonic song now and the only thing I'm coming up with is a Dot Allison song from around the same time or maybe a few years later. After Portishead and Tricky, there was a trip hop explosion of bands like Hooverphonic. To be fair to them (because Underwater was in a bit of the same boat,) I'm sure that they had nothing to do with being lumped in with the trip hop masses other than the fact that they rode the wave where it was going at the time. I think that after Massive Attack's Mezzanine came out, the game was up and people couldn't play the 'they are like the new Portishead' card anymore. Besides, most of the bands like Hooverphonic never had much to do with the Portishead/Tricky/Massive Attack aesthetic--they just had female singers and laid-back songs and sometimes that's all an undiscerning audience or writer needs to come up with a label, marketing plan, and concert tour.

I bought a ticket for this, and my roomate Keith just got handed tickets for it. I remember that he didn't seem all that interested in going and even though he had gotten some free tickets, he kind of shrugged and played it off like "I'm sure there's something better to do than to go to see Garbage tonight." Maybe there was, and by the time of this show my interest in them was starting to wane, but I still got a little antsy at the thought that he was so dismissive of the gig.

Garbage was obviously stealing part of their MO from Curve, but they had taken the sound out of goth/industrial clubs and onto top 40 radio. I don't know how much of that owed to Shirley Manson's sexed up media persona and how much of it was due to the music actually being catchy, but by this time, Garbage was a popular act. When people teeter on that line between underground cool and highly-exposed pop, a band like Garbage becomes a bit of a lithmus test. Not that such things should really ever play into a decision, but the question starts to become "do you really like ?" and the answer to that question either admits you to hip society or gets you banished from it. It's funny how that works, and how it can be perfectly acceptible to like a band up until a certain point when the tastemakers turn on it, and how after that happens, any association with the band is seen as cool anathema!

I never much worried about that--I liked what I liked--whether that meant Coil or Melanie C. In time, it would become cool to like over-exposed pop music again, and I guess that kids now have a different kind of dividing line because their media is so chopped up and redistributed in different ways. If you are a a white kid from the suburbs who has moved into town for college or to make it for the first time on your own living in an apartment with three friends, it's apparently very cool to like dirty south hip hop, booty music, and Justin Timberlake. I mean, I like some of that too, but watching people go nuts for it in their Chucks and indie rock t-shirts is just a little unsettling. In a way, the cool-factor of the music you get into now seems to be more about how sincerely you approach it than it does how much you actually like it. Maybe this was always the case and I was just too immersed in my own world to notice. I make no bones about the fact that I liked and still do listen to pop music, and that I appreciate it sincerely. I don't think that it's cool or that it adds a lot to my life in any deeply artistic way, but then neither does a lot of music that sells a lot less. If I had free tickets to see Garbage today, I'm pretty sure I would still go.

What do you do when one of your favorite bands of all time finally comes to town several years past when you should really care? This happened more recently for me with the Police on their reunion tour--a band I have always loved and wanted to see live, but who I gave up on in the late 80s and who decided to tour 20 years too late. Curve was absolutely one of my favorite acts in the early 90s and in fact all through college. By 1998, however, they'd ceased being near the center of my musical world and they had started to slip into that ether of bands that once released records that moved me that either no longer existed or existed only to frustrate me. Curve's post Cuckoo material isn't terrible by any means, but Come Clean was not the record that Cuckoo or Doppelganger had been--it wasn't a classic, genre-twising and defining piece of greatness. Curve it seemed had not learned the My Bloody Valentine lesson that says "sometimes when you make a classic record, you just stop because you can't top it." For me, Cuckoo is every bit as important as Loveless.

Past their prime and on the heels of a major label deal, a failed Bond theme song, and money sunk into a rare North American tour, Curve rolled into Atlanta right around the time that I moved here. I was excited beyond belief to see them until I actually SAW them. I should note that this was 10 years ago and that I've matured a bit in my perception of these kinds of things, but wow, it was kind of depressing to see my favorite band take the stage looking like old people. I have no idea how old they were, but clearly Dean was struggling with the rigor of playing on stage every night and Toni did not look like the sveldt vixen I'd always imagined. It's incredibly shallow to want your rock star idols to wow with you with that sex appeal and effortless charisma, and I've since divorced myself from those kinds of needs, but at the time, I was just incredibly disappointed that Curve looked like my aunt and uncle!

This was the first time that I really dealt with the idea of live music and rock music in particular being a young person's game. It had never really occurred to me that at some point I would start to catch up to and then surpass the age of the performers that I admire. I wasn't close to catching Toni and Dean in age, but seeing people that I idolized in my relative youth as aging and possibly over-the-hill adults who looked as out of place at a rock show as my professors from college really got me thinking. It illuminated the way that music performance is in many ways just selling that youthful, sexy, rebellious, and cooler-than-normal-people vibe that separates the performers from the audience. I've never thought much about that myself as I've performed, but as I get older now and I go to see bands or I play shows with performers who are five to ten years younger than I am, I start to get it. I've never thought of myself as the old and uncool dude who still gets up on the stage, but then I'm sure Dean didn't either at that point. Still, there will come some moment where I will realize that not only am I too old for all the ridiculous gyrations of being in a band, but that audiences will SEE that I'm too old for that and they'll wonder why I keep trying to be hip.

Maybe it helps to never try to be hip. Maybe it also helps to just make music that you love and that moves you and to care fuckall about what anyone thinks about how old you are or how cool you look or about how well you keep up with the kids and their Mac Book Pros. I know that I still love making and sometimes performing music. I know that I also don't NEED to perform it for people enough to put up with sleeping on sofas covered in cat hair for two weeks. I'm happy with my life and with the music that I make, and I want to keep sharing it with people as long as they want to hear it. I hope that I never look like that out of touch guy, but I guess that as long as I'm in touch with what I'm trying to do, the rest doesn't really matter.

To this day I still listen to Curve on a regular basis. I imagine that they are long past the touring days and I know that their latest records have continued to have a few great moments sprinkled among a lot of just OK ones. Still, I hope that they too keep on doing whatever it is they want to do no matter what us kids think of how funny they look trying to rock out through the chorus of "Fait Accompli." As long as they love it, that's good enough for me these days.

The Portishead show required another trip from Florida up to Atlanta, and by this time I was fairly sure that I would end up living in Atlanta eventually as there were just too many reasons that it was better than Tampa, Gainesville, or Tallahassee. I wasn't sure how Portishead would come across live since so much of what I love about them is the way the samples sound and the way that I can tell the music is built up from records instead of instruments. I have the same problem with a lot of rap shows, where MCs feel like they need to replace the DJ with a band and all of the nuance of the music gets squeezed out. Thankfully, Portishead avoided this by being a fucking amazing live band.

The show kicked off with a DJ taking the audience drolly through a history of records that Portishead has sampled. No shit. It was the most condescending opening act that I've ever seen, but it was all part of the plan so it must have seemed like a good idea to someone. It was on the one hand interesting to hear some of the records that got chopped into Portishead songs, but it was on the other hand annoying that the DJ felt like giving the audience a musical history lesson. Maybe that sort of thing wouldn't bother most people at a show like that, but having thought a lot about HOW Portishead makes their music, it just struck me as too gimmicky and snobbish.

After the DJ though, the band was fantastic. The drummer had two or three different snares to replicate the sound of the looped drums from the records and he was incredibly precise with that. I loved watching the guitar and organ and other instruments come together in an organic way that still stayed true to the very looped nature of the music, and the DJ cuts and sample loops over everything kept the old vinyl pop in place. I was frankly less interested in the vocals than I would have imagined because I was fixated on how well the band played those songs, made them dynamic, but also didn't lose what I loved about them in the first place.

Though the ticket lists The Rentals as the opening act, I have no recollection of seeing them. I love The Rentals, perhaps not as much as my friend Missy, but I would have certainly tried to catch them had they played. I had two main motivations for checking out this show. The first was that a friend of mine from the dorm in Tallahassee was a huge Garbage fan, the only person other than me that I knew who collected all the odd 3" CD singles and b-side tracks, and he wanted to go pretty badly. The second was that I had talked to my friends from Rabbit in the Moon and I had heard that Garbage would be opening their set with the RITM remix of "Queer."

That second motivation turned out to be mostly correct--the band opened their set with some loops and an intro that was from the RITM mix and then launched into the more rock-oriented version of "Queer" and it was pretty cool to see. Around this time, Rabbit in the Moon was starting to have remixes published by big names in the pop music world. It was one thing to have a dance-only 12" with their name on it, but quite something else for an internationally distributed CD Single from a major pop band to sport "Rabbit in the Moon" in the credits. I was stoked.

I've always loved watching friends go on to do great things. I've been lucky enough to be around a lot of talented people who have turned their passion for music or art or writing or science into big work that is enjoyed or used or seen by lots of people. There's something about accomplishments on that scale that I find appealing, but it's not the fame. Dave from RITM couldn't have been more humble and out-of-the-way about his accomplishment as Butch Vig was firing off loops of his remix to a sold out crowd at the State Theater. It wasn't the fame and the recognition that I admired, it was the scale of the work that had stretched beyond what seemed reasonably possible into the realm of "I can't believe this is happening." To know that friends and colleagues have worked on big and sometimes important projects, or with well-known and visionary producers, directors, and scientists is exciting for me. I've had a small bit of luck with that myself, but I think I enjoy watching others peak above their own expectations for themselves even more than I do experiencing that myself!

I had to drive up to Atlanta to see Godflesh, but I would have driven a lot farther than that. Godflesh was on my short list of bands that I'd waited years to see, and while I wasn't as big a fan of Songs of Love and Hate as I was of some of their earlier work, there was no chance that I was going to pass this show up. The Rosewater Elizabeth crew had already moved to Atlanta by this point and the very early days of Underwater were under way, so I somehow convinced Jeremy to put me up for a night and go with me to see Godflesh.

I had begun to collect all things Broadrick by the time this tour rolled around, and with the help of an unlikely record store in Tallahassee called "CD Exchange," I was amassing a set of Final, Sidewinder, Techno Animal, and other odd discs. There are a few artists that I've latched on to over the years who have been inspiring in their ability to put a unique stamp on anything they do: Justin Broadrick, Mick Harris, Jack Dangers, Bill Laswell, Robin Guthrie--but none did so with more variety and experimentation than than the man behind Godflesh.

When we got to the show, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the in-between-bands music wasn't more Earache metal, but instead Basic Channel type minimal techno. This had to have been Broadrick's doing, and I've always wondered why more bands don't take the opportunity to mix things up like that. After all, when you're at a loud ass metal show with a number of bands that are all going to be blazing away with Marshall stacks, it's a fantastic way to give ears a break and cleanse the palette so to speak to put on something completely different. Broadrick was one of the guys who helped me warm up to the idea that purely electronic music and muscular, guitar-driven rock could sound different but come from the same place. That undercurrent of isolation and despair and sometimes defeatism that runs through Godflesh can also easily be picked up in the bleakly minimal drones and clicks of Basic Channel records, and it's actually easy to see now how someone like Broadrick moves around into different guises but always maintains his distinct voice.

Godflesh took the stage and proceeded to pound out the loudest show in the history of loud shows. Swans was loud, but part of that was the acoustics of the venue and the way that the sound focused on an area near the back of the room that made it gut-rumbling. Meat Beat in New Orleans was loud, but that was more about a proper mix of frequencies in a small room than pure decibels. Godflesh on the other hand was simply pushing me back from the stage further and further with each song. I started out thinking that I would brave it somewhere near the pit, but by the end I was on the other side of the wall at the Masquarade where the bar sits. At one point, Jeremy had to go to the bathroom and so I walked that way with him and I remember squinting my eyes as we neared the speakers in some vain attempt to keep the sound from forcing its way into my skull, knocking bits of my brain out of my ears.

I still would have liked to have seen the Pure-era Godflesh or the Selfless/Merciless Godflesh that played long, extended dirges, but the Love and Hate Godflesh was still a great treat. Besides, Jesu perfected what Merciless was hinting at anyway, and more than a decade after this show, I'd get to see Jesu playing Conqueror which made up for everything!