Tonight: Performing on Dead Red Velvet’s Streaming Internet Concert

Tonight’s Show

Tonight, from 10:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (UTC – 4), Dead Red Velvet, my friend Karl Mohr’s arty, gothy, cabaret-y music project, will be airing a live internet performance, and I will be joining him! I’ll be backing him up on accordion for the goth-tastically maudlin-yet-catchy song Can Your Remains be Buried with Mine?, which I performed with him at the Tranzac Club back in 2007, as pictured below:

Yeah, it got weird, and it was cool.

A number of us will be piling into Karl’s place, where we’ll be broadcasting the show, including:

• Host Louise Bak,
• Musician Ian Revell,
• Darren Hyde, who’ll be doing the interpretative painting,
• Steven Cerritos will both film the proceedings and project films

Here’s how Karl describes the event:

Not a regular concert, Dead Red Velvet has never broken down the stage/audience barrier mid-concert before. We see this as a technology-mediated event with an interesting set of intersecting filters and advantages. With the help of our host, we hope to bring the warmth and spontaneity of an intimate house concert with all the distributive power and interactivity of the internet. Weird!

You’ll be able to log in and converse with us as well. It’s going to be interactive, odd, and fun!

Hop online tonight at 10 EST and join us! We’ll be at onairgigs.com.

How I Met Karl Mohr

I first met Karl Mohr in 1990 at the start of the school year when he was a frosh at my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University. I was DJing a party for incoming students and he wanted to congratulate me on playing Nine Inch Nails’ Head lIke a Hole, a song he hadn’t expected to hear, what the demographics of the place being largely preppie. It turned out that like me, he was a synth player, and that chance meeting turned into a friendship with some interesting collaborations. We even took a couple of courses together, even though our disciplines were vastly different (he was a music major, studying composition; I was in computer science), thanks to the Music Department’s strong support of electronic music and technology courses.

I probably wouldn’t have become the Accordion Guy without Karl. I’d had the accordion for a few months, but didn’t take it to the streets until Karl suggested that we take our squeezeboxes to a hospital cuts protest on Saturday, May 1st, 1999. We ended up wandering all over downtown Toronto, playing rock and pop tunes to surprised passers-by until passed Toronto’s most notorious goth club: The Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar.

There, after playing a Marilyn Manson-style “Happy Birthday” for Mark the Bouncer, DJ Todd, who watched the whole thing, issued a challenge.

“Come back tonight,” he said, “and play anything that the crowd would like. I’ll put you onstage. If you get any applause — any applause at all — I will set you up with all the beer you can drink.”

We ran home and learned the song that led us to meet — Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole — and returned that evening in black clothing. Here’s the outcome:

If you’d like to read a more detailed recounting of the day I became the Accordion Guy with Karl, the story’s here.