This week's #ThisDealInHistory is the second clip taken from our 09/07/02 show in Kingston, ON.
Kingston was an early destination for tND - it's a big college town only two hours down the road from Toronto and we had lots of friends there. They enjoyed getting down and never missed a chance to do just that whenever the New Deal came to town. This show is no exception.
The clip starts out with a heavy funk beatbox+drums groove from Darren while Dan channels his inner Stevie Wonder with some pretty insane synth-bass sounds. I like how his playing style actually resembles a synth performance as opposed to a bass guitar performance. - he's definitely committed to the bit.
Around 1:15 we take it out of the funk jam into something more dance-oriented. Last week i talked about how i began applying the "less-is-more" approach to my playing in order to not step all over everything all the time. I seem to be partially applying that lesson, particularly around 1:45 where there's more silence than sound coming from the keyboard department. The cue for "The Ray Parker Suite" gets triggered at 3:40 (and some people hear it and cheer) but, as usual, we take our time getting to the actual track. I endlessly repeat the chords with my left hand, eventually adding some right-hand Moog while we get into the three-way syncopation, all the while building towards the main track at 5:03.
I either forgot to play the Moog section at 5:28 or we might have been going through a period where we were leaving that soaring melody to appear later in the song - even money on which one it was.
I do eventually get to it and off we go at 6:37 into one of my favourite Juno 106 sounds. The moog eventually joins in with harmonized melodic lines. I dig the sounds going on at 8:47 - those hi-hats are killer and the flanged white noise is being played by me. We tease the hell out of VL Tone, eventually landing on it around 10:10. This would be an extremely early version of VL Tone, as it was written on stage at our NYC shows in May, 2002 (as documented on our "Live:NYC 5/31+6/1" double disc release). You'll notice that we haven't worked out the "regular" ending yet, choosing to pick a spot and just flop down to signal the end. -Jamie
