The Waveform #019: Small Rooms, Big Records

Wednesday night, a room above a pub, ninety people and a PA balanced on two beer crates. The singer had to stand in the doorway to fit the neck of the guitar into the room, so a third of the set was performed to the corridor and the corridor loved it. Nobody asked for a refund, and the merch table was a chair. I have paid four times as much for a worse view of a better band, in a room where the nearest human being was a security guard.

Low Ceiling's Debut

Theo Anand on a band who will not play a venue over 200 capacity and have made a record that behaves the same way. Everything sits close and slightly cramped, the drums are audibly in a room that is too small for them, and the result is not claustrophobia but an intimacy that scales badly on purpose. It is the rare debut that a bigger budget would have damaged.

Also this week

• Liner Notes: In Defense of the Skip Button. Dario Fontaine argues that the album was always a container and never a contract, and that skipping is a form of attention rather than its absence.
• Postcards From the Reykjavik DIY Circuit. Five venues built for entirely other purposes, including a fish plant canteen and a working lighthouse.

One more thing

Small rooms need one piece of equipment more than they need better speakers, and it is a sound level meter. Second-hand ones go for about the price of two tickets, they run for a year on a nine-volt battery, and the trick is to put the thing on the bar rather than on the stage. Most rooms that feel unbearably loud are only unbearable in one narrow band, usually somewhere the vocal lives, and it is almost always fixable in ten minutes with a competent engineer. You cannot argue a promoter out of a feeling, but you can hand one a number.

See you next week. Ada