07 November 2010

Arne von Brill (Busan, pt. 1)


    

    I was in a band, before. We were the Brill, Arne von Brill. Named for an international guitar salesman. We played the sort of music that requires a sneer, rock that you will love or hate very quickly, and will continue to either love or loathe. And I sit here now, listening to the tracks, pre-release, remembering the band, the best and the worst parts of it, bilaterally divided just like that: no middle, neutral ground. Just great, sneering enthusiasm for what was good, and bitter resentment about what never worked out well.





They went through 3 bassists before they found me, and a whole train full of refugees. We went through two drummers, and we're on the cusp of a new record. Broken up, but still producing. We're modern like that. Being in a group is hard: if you contribute, you have to pay attention. If you don't contribute, you must execute the ideas of others, perfectly. Provide flourishes unexpected but known thereafter to have always been necessary. It might not have been my music but I was part of it. And now it's gone, and the new album arrives, rec'd, mixed and mastered by an American music industry veteran for no small amount of pocket change, and we've no way to do the best thing we ever did, show off, piss about, on stage, in costume, ourselves. Funny how we were always more ourselves decked out in fuckwit outfits. There's no other description. Frenchies from Mars, butch bulldyke lumberjacks, German golfers: listening to the music now gets me right back to it, and the feeling of the onstage glare returned like a follow spot right into your face is unmistakable. 


    

    In Busan, it's not so cold around New Year's, when we arrived at the hotel. Twenty minutes until midnight. And drinks are cheap, and sleep is hard to come by what with the flashing neon and rock-hard beds never intended for shut-eye, since no one sleeps at hotels in Korea, generally.
    Rewind two years:
    Back before we decided we should make our efforts more 'serious,' as the deadly word was, we played with cheapshit instruments through cheapshit pedals in bars deserving of our level of investment. The songs were interesting but not special. But they wanted to be more, and we could make it happen. So we parted with our first drummer and went into the studio, and I sat down behind the kit to help pound out a shamefully untuned, scatterbrained effort that you will never hear. And we learned very quickly what not to do.
    What you will hear came later. It came with the mindset that follows purchasing a 1500-dollar guitar and cables at 100 each, to clear out the noise, to let your real intention come out. Our new drummer, audiophile that he was, never stopped commenting on the bands we would see together, noting the expensive instruments, the 600-dollar fuzz boxes and drive pedals, only to be gutted of the entire effect of having purchased an artisan-made, Class A electronic device by running the whole works through cables worth their quantity in singles. 
   Mind you, I'm not sure our efforts met with any difference. Of all the clubs I've played here, only one has consistently good sound, the kind of transparent soundboard operation philosophy that won't mask a shit performer with reverb and excessive, deafening volume: Club TA, my personal, perennial favorite. 
    But it showed, even when the sound didn't allow, in ways as simple as being one of the few bands that ever bothered to tune onstage, which seems like a fairly basic necessity. We began to follow through. 

More to come. About the band, about us in Busan, being accosted by people who became rather irate at the flamboyant outfits we were wearing, about everything.

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