sǝuoſ ǝuıɥsunS

It’s 2 am in San Francisco. The party upstairs is just getting going. Jason is three margueritas into ambient land, and we’re all set up. We got there later than we wanted to, but I was still loading up the MMT-8’s with new ideas to perform, and making sure everything was saved and possibly backed up. We made our way down the back stairs, stepping over ravers, avoiding hugs, and the foaming mouths of people who might not have realized immediately that we were carrying huge flight cases and that they might be heavy.

The cases stack up without thinking about it. I place the devices, and arrange the system. She opens a black plastic suitcase and begins to plug in the midi cables, the audio cables, power. We test, debug, and do a quick headphone mix. Everything sounds good, and looks like it’s working. Jason wanders over and says he’s been playing for hours and is really ready for us to take over. I do a little check in the system, play a note, whisper something into the mic. It’s good, we’re good. We begin.

Our residency in the chill room at come unity was a sketch pad, a playground, a place to begin from nothing, let the 808 clave tick once into the delay, and loop like that for a long time. People were always talking, resting, tripping when we began… and then at the end the entire room was surging and dancing to our 98 bpm polyrthyms, gentle vocals and lush pads. A song might last 40 minutes. there were no rules, no boundaries, it was fun.

The opportunity to experiment live like this came upon us via Jason and Malachy. They thought us playing live in the basement would be a treat. They paid us nothing compared to what we made to play up tempo house on dance floors all over the world, but it wasn’t about the money. It was about love, friendship, community and the challenge of approaching our craft from an entirely different direction.

During this period we had just begun to fly places for single shows. It’s true we continued the tradition of long, drawn out road trip style touring, but things were heating up. We had hit singles and more booking offers than we could possibly accept. Good times. The best they got. But we were overwhelmed, and it was really, really nice to sit on the floor of the chill room, at a party we loved and went to anyway, and just explore and sing, play and whisper, and rock the bass bins in a completely different way.

This photograph appeared in my inbox on myspace yesterday. I stared at it for a little while before it occurred to me that it was a photograph of me. Me and my long time partner, Moonbeam. This was a picture of Dubtribe. We were obviously about to perform, because my hair is so big in this picture, and quite dry… so nothing had happened yet. From the shirt and vest combo I have to place it somewhere in the very early 90’s. Was my hair ever that long? Did it really get so much longer? Was my face ever really that fat and shiny? And who is that woman sitting beside me? Did she really have a voice which could shatter hearts like windows, and bring a warehouse stuffed full of people to it’s knees? Did we really take ourselves so seriously?