Thanks to The Midwest Music Foundation (and their many sponsors) I was able to head down to Austin this year with The Empty Spaces for the MidCoast Takeover unofficial SxSW showcase. MidCoast was two days of featured bands from Kansas City, Lawrence, and the Midwest region playing on the Shangri-La stage. It was a success for Kansas City, even scoring some press in USA Today

These are the scumbags I rode down with.

I had a lot of fun watching other bands and blowing lots of cash in Austin’s many bars, restaurants, and food trucks. It was my first SxSW experience, and though I didn’t get into any of the “official” showcases, I got plenty of clues as to what the music portion of this festival was all about. Two highlights of the weekend for me were seeing Deerhoof in a big warehouse and watching Hearts of Darkness on the MidCoast stage performing to a huge crowd of dancin’ fools.

The Empty Spaces played a consolidated set on Friday night, right before The Beautiful Bodies and Hearts of Darkness. This was an incredible slot that we were very fortunate to have been placed in. I got to play a beautiful C&C Drums kit, which due to the set hardware they used for all the bands and my short-ish stature was set up a little too high for me. I ended up busting a knuckle and bleeding on the tom heads. Marking my territory, I suppose.

Here’s a webcast of our set, during which the audio switches to what sounds like the rack tom and reverb return tracks soloed out. Weird things happen with the audio, but you get the idea.

As an aside, if you’re ever in Austin’s East Side, check out the Eastside Showroom. Their cocktails are top-notch and the upscale mid-30’s atmosphere is a hoot.

I did a series of posters for The Empty Spaces’ 2011 summer tour, affectionately nicknamed “soccer tour 2k11” after the soccer camp van we rented for transportation. They’re all slight revisions of a poster I did a while back that didn’t get much exposure. The illustration depicts what it would look like if aliens came to Earth and dumped a bunch of pink bubbly goo on some houses.

I’ve been playing with Mat and Will for a while in a band called The Empty Spaces, morphing out of Mat’s solo project. We recently recorded a four song EP that is now available from Golden Sound Records. I played drums, engineered, and mastered it.

We recorded it live straight to an Otari 1/4” 2-track tape machine. It was my first real experience working with tape, but after a reel and a half of unspooled mess I started to get the hang of it. All tracks were mixed through an Allen & Heath Mixwizard WZ2 16:2 board. Mat’s vocals ran through a JOEMEEK TwinQ with some slap-back delay from a Roland RE-501.

I played my Gretsch Catalina club kit with my Tama Starclassic snare. All drums were fitted with Aquarian Modern Vintage heads except the kick drum, which sported a Remo Coated Ambassador on the batter side and a stock resonant head. I placed sheets of paper over the snare and floor tom heads for a little extra dampening and high frequency attack. The cymbals were a 21” Zildjan Sweet ride, an 18” Istanbul Mehmet Sultan Flat Ride, and 13” Zildjan K Custom Dark hats.

The kit was miked with a Cascade X-15 stereo ribbon mic overhead. I did have to boost some 12-15k for some high end (15k is as high as the MixWizard’s EQ goes) but I was really pleased with the self compression and beefiness of this mic. The kick drum was captured by an AKG D112, and the snare a good ol’ SM57, both running through dbx 163’s with a considerable amount of compression.

The bass was played through a Gibson G100-B 2x15” amp and miked with a Cascade Fat Head about a foot and a half away.

The stereo output of the mixer was routed to the ins of the Otari and we monitored from there, doing takes of the songs until we had ones we liked. The tape was hit pretty hard; you can really hear it on the snare. It made us a little nervous to throw down live takes straight to tape without someone actively listening to the mix in another room. There’s no mixing post 2-track, so we had to get it right before we recorded. I’m happy with what we ended up with, but it’s definitely one of those EPs where you can tell the drummer engineered it.

As a tribute to our experience, we laid out the packaging to look like the boxes the reels of Quantegy tape came in. The disc looks like a little reel of tape. It’s entertaining so the music doesn’t have to be.

We go on a week-long tour starting this weekend, hoping to sell copies and have some fun. It’s my goal to achieve at least one of those. Dates are up on the website. You can download a digital copy or order a CD from Golden Sound Records for $4/$5.