During the Buffalo Infringement Festival of 2014, I played a lot of shows. This particular solo performance at Karpeles Manuscript Museum occurred about two hours before another gig of mine down the street at Babeville, where I had a second short solo set opening for Epilogue, a band I also played keyboards in. I was already thinking about the logistics of moving all my gear while trying to focus on the task in front of me. I always had so much equipment just to make the noise happen in the first place, and adding the responsibility of keeping track of recording gear was just another layer of stress, so, of course, when I finally bring something to record the set, it runs out of memory twenty minutes in.
The venue itself is stunning, and the foyer I played in is made almost entirely of marble, which means the natural reverb stretches out for what feels like an eternity, turning even the slightest sound into something massive. To my immediate right, there was a small, unassuming display case on a free-standing pedestal containing the original sheet music for either The Wedding March, or maybe it was Happy Birthday; one of those—a song ingrained in our culture, universally recognized, and the idea of seeing the handwritten draft by the composer, penned as they were figuring it out, was surreal, especially given that right next to it was me, figuring out songs that will be heard by fewer than 200 people in total, both live and from the recording, and forgotten long before they were even finished.
And when I say “figuring out songs,” I mean I walked in with absolutely no idea what I was going to do, no setlist, nothing pre-written—just a bass, an amp, two keyboards, twenty hours of recordings of people talking, about 250 to 300 pounds of electronics, and a vague idea that I would create a sound, react to it with my gear, and let the performance build itself organically, with no music samples, no pre-programmed sequences, and a self-imposed rule against playing any tune remotely familiar to me.
It was alright. This recording captured the first few awkward minutes I spent warming up, but I played for over an hour and eventually got better. At some point, a jazz band in the other room started their sound check, and rather than ignore it or let it bother me, I played along, incorporating their unintentional contribution into whatever I was doing. After a few minutes, they must have caught on to what was happening and started playing along with me. It was like I was backed up by a band of ghosts. The audience was receptive, and there was a solid turnout.
The Infringement Festival itself, according to Wikipedia, began in Montreal in 2004 and is “an international, interdisciplinary critical arts festival that features theatre, music, film, culture jamming, street performance and visual arts, with an emphasis on activist art and work that challenges the commodification of culture.” I know it as an annual ten-day stretch when my buddy Curt Rotterdam books between 400 and 600 obscure and weird acts in every venue and crevice he can find in Buffalo, creating a citywide performance free-for-all where, for an entire week, you can be walking down the street and suddenly stumble upon a band playing in an alleyway, a play performed in a bookstore, a clown in a canoe doing who-knows-what in someone’s backyard—absolute chaos, but incredibly well-organized chaos.
Since Infringement Fest was conceived as “the alternative Fringe Festival”—a direct counter to the highly commercial, bank-sponsored, and, some would argue, sanitized Fringe Fest— a few people saw its level of organization as a form of hypocrisy, as if the mere act of running it efficiently meant it had somehow sold out. I remember one night outside of Nietzsche’s Bar before our band went on, a kid pulled out an acoustic guitar and started busking, which would have been fine if he hadn’t set up less than ten feet away from an already scheduled street performance and started playing loudly over them. When he was eventually asked by security—politely—to stop, he didn’t argue, didn’t escalate, didn’t even try to make a case for himself; instead, he muttered under his breath, “Bullshit,” and smashed his guitar on the ground in protest, sending a few bucks he had in his tip hat flying. He continued, in one fluid motion, leaving the splintered remains, the money, and the hat on the sidewalk to take off down the street at a full sprint—like a baseball batter who’d just hit an infield groundball. This might have all been part of the performance. We will never know.
Anyway, I had known Curt for years from working alongside him as stagehands, so he always set me up with the choice gigs for the Fest. He knew that, at the very least, I would show up, and that I wouldn’t be in any bullshit bands. My solo live act, however, was absolute bullshit by design, but he knew that, too.