The Waveform #015: Horizontal Rain

It has rained on the office skylight every day since we got back from the Fjord site, which at least keeps the mood consistent. Three of us came home with the same cough, one of us lost a jacket to a field in a way nobody has been able to explain, and the recorders all still work. Somewhere on that site there is a Wire umbrella that lasted eleven minutes and a folding chair that belongs to nobody now. The schedule did not survive. The gear did.

At the Fjord Festival, the Weather Is the Headliner

Silas Reyes filed three days from a site where the forecast wrote the running order, and the weather won every argument it entered. The set everyone left talking about happened when the generator failed on Saturday night and the stage carried on in the dark with whatever still held a charge. It is a festival report that mostly refuses to rank things, and it is better for it.

Also this week

• What We Lose When the Venue Becomes a Condo. Dario Fontaine on agent-of-change rules and the arithmetic that decides whether a 300-capacity room survives its next neighbour.
• Wire Mix 013: Music for Waiting Rooms. Still the Studio Pass mix in heaviest rotation here, and still the correct soundtrack to a week of grey afternoons.

One more thing

The most useful object at the festival was not a microphone. A stage tech lent me a roll of self-amalgamating tape, the black rubbery stuff that bonds to itself and to nothing else, and by Sunday it had waterproofed two cable joins, one recorder and somebody's left boot. A roll costs about the same as a round of drinks and then lives in the bottom of a bag for years without deteriorating, which is not something you can say about gaffer tape in a wet field. Buy two, lose one, still be ahead.

Dry socks and a good weekend. Ada