The Third Rail (formerly WANK) debut at La Mama, Carlton, Jan 26, 2015

Jan 26, 2015 - Australia Day, Australia's national holiday, known as Invasion Day by our Indigenous colleagues, was the time for a concert at La Mama, in which The Third Rail breathed its first breath, so to speak.  Once upon a time in Wollongong, Gary Butler headed up WANK, the Wollongong Anarchist Noisemakers Kollektive, but now the three main members of the group, Gary, me and Houston Dunleavy, are all based in Melbourne.  So it was time to revive the group and get a new name.  Which we did, and performed the opening concert of the 2015 season of La Mama Musica.  We had guests, too - Ren Walters, guitar; Dale Gorfinkel, switches and hose; Julia Reidy, guitar, and Rod Cooper, upright.  The Gorfinkel and Cooper instruments are home-mades, as you'll see in the photos.

The concert began with a set in which I duetted wth Ren Walters, and Dale Gorfinkel, separated by a solo.  Here's a picture of Ren and me performing - him on guitar and me on laptop.  I'm using the Kaivo softsynth for my part:

And here's a recording of our duet:

I then did a solo on iPad, using the Novation Launchpad, Audiobus and Jasuto apps.  This enabled me to perform a collage of pre-existing sounds which were then processed through two 15 second delays and pannings. Here's a video of 2 minutes near the start of the piece:

And here's a recording of the complete 9 minute piece:

Finally, I did a duet with Dale Gorfinkel, who was playing his wonderful "Switches and Hose" instrument, which in this case, was hanging from the stairwell at La Mama.  Here's a picture of Dale in action:

And here's a picture of the two of us in action.  Dale is hidden in the shadows here.

And here's the recording of the two of us performing:

The concert continued with a trio from Gary Butler, Ren Walters and Julia Reidy on guitars. Here's a picture of them in action:

And here's a closeup of Gary's guitar neck, prepared with true-blue dinky-di Australia Day patriotic mutes:

Rod Cooper performed his wonderful home-made "Upright" which combines lamellophone and plucked string techniques:

Rod performed this in duet with Houston Dunleavy on clarinet.  Then everyone performed together.  In this picture we have Ren Walters, Houston Dunleavy, Julia Reidy, Dale Gorfinkel, me, and Gary Butler, l to r:

And finally, here's a closeup of me and Gary near the end of the improv.  Things had gotten fairly rowdy by this time, so I was using Marcus Hobbs' SmackTalk app, which records a slice of time, then plays it back a couple of octaves higher, accompanied by an animation of a guinea pig singing the sounds.  (Marcus, by the way, is also the developer of the Wilsonic app that I use in my performing.)

A good time was had by all.  Thanks for Annabel Warmington for organizing the gig and asking us to perform!  And many many thanks to Catherine Schieve for taking all the photos and video!