21 Apr 2015 2 min read music

Mainstream success is super imminent

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UPDATE: About a year after I posted this, we were already done, though we probably played more shows than the other Make-a-Band groups. I did, however, go on to form An Empty Room with David the drummer, which lasted until he moved to Switzerland. I'm also still in touch with the band "producer" Mike. It was, all in all, a great thing to do.

Life since the move is mostly an endless series of boxes, but I have managed to get myself embroiled in one of the weirdest artistic situations of my almost 20 years of playing music.

I'd seen the Make-A-Band posters around town but hadn't really given much thought to what it even was. Erika saw an ad in the Eugene Weekly and convinced me that I was sufficiently musical and lacking in dignity to do it. So what is it? Basically, a bunch of musicians audition for 6 producers, who pick them to form 6 bands. The bands then perform in a competition.

The producers are local studio owners, record engineers, and (in the case of the ones who picked me) people in the business of video game scoring. The auditions are 3 minutes. And the competition is downtown, outdoors, for the whole damn ass world to see.

Even with Sharks, I don't feel like I ever took traditional, above-ground routes to musical performance and networking. It was always the DIY, punk rock thing — which of course in Austin is the only way anybody manages because it's a "who you know" situation and I've rarely known anything or anybody. But regardless of how this thing turns out, I've met some like-minded people and many of the folks making the Eugene music scene tick.

So here's the band, Gravity Nocturne. We're doing a jazzy, updated take on trip-hop. We're also all like 21, except me.

Don't worry, I'll be back to playing for nobody soon.