#end vacuum

[inthecompanyofincubus-blog]

alright, well this is where i'm stopping my spam. (tumblr gave me a time out for my photo uploading. oooops.)

however, i did want to include this link here. this is to a youtube user who went to "end.>vacuum" back in 2008 and recorded each piece. admittedly, the quality isn't very good at all. they must have been in the balcony, or something but... point is, if you've never heard the pieces, you should at least give it a listen.

okay.

good.

<33

[tao-of-incubus]

Sixth Step: Skirting the Vacuum

I got married in April of 2007 and promptly got the hell out of my parents' house, out of Maryland, out of the entire Eastern Seaboard. Literally the day after my wedding I picked up everything I hadn't already shipped and moved to Los Angeles, California. I don't suppose I can particularly have been said to have looked back much. I was very excited to move to Los Angeles, for a great many reasons, not the least of which was that I would be in the heart of an active music scene and closer to where many of the bands I love lived (and thus closer to places they would be sure to play shows, since people skipped Maryland all the time but no one ever skips Los Angeles). Of course, to my utter dismay, 2007 sparked the start of a five-year hiatus from making new music for Incubus, seemingly sparked by Mike's struggles with carpal tunnel syndrome which caused a series of cancelled shows in Europe. Not to be deterred, however, in 2008, Mike hosted the only performance of his musical composition End.>Vacuum at UCLA's Royce Hall. I was several months pregnant at the time but I didn't let that stop me: I really wanted to see what Mike was capable of outside of the context of Incubus. I'd bought Brandon's books, and was eager to see the same kind of effort from someone else in my favorite band.

While pregnancy has a tendency of erasing almost anything you might try to think while it happens, I remember End.>Vacuum very vividly. I remember almost elbowing the Guest Speaker (Dr. Brian Cox) in the kidneys while waiting in the atrium to be seated. I remember how his powerpoint presentation was not operating properly and he offered the tech controlling it that, "For $500 and hour, I can go up there and teach you how to click forward and back..." and I remember how although I couldn't get the special visualization Mike had worked so hard on to work for me (damn you, glasses) I really, really enjoyed the musical experience. I especially liked the last piece, "Trepidation for Typewriters and Woodwinds", if only because it struck me as so damn cool that Mike Einziger had written music FOR TYPEWRITERS. I came away from the night exhausted, happy, and optimistic for the future of Incubus.

But then there was the Monuments and Melodies Tour. Don't get me wrong; I still went to the tour. I still loved the band then and I love the band now. But even then, while that tour was happening, something just felt wrong to me. I'm not even certain I can express what I thought was wrong; there was just a sense that something in the balance of the band was off, and it seemed to center around the erstwhile Mr. Boyd. There are a lot of rumors of what was going on in that time but suffice to say, I was worried. The connection the band had always fostered with its fans seemed to have been strained, if not severed; Brandon seemed to be going out of his way to be anyone but himself, and then there was Black Heart Inertia. I might be about to annoy some people here, but I'm pretty much of the opinion that Black Heart Inertia is an abomination of a song that shouldn't have ever happened. The musicality behind it is sound--I actually really like Mike's contribution in specific--but the lyrics are so banal, such a poor showing compared to what Brandon had been capable of in the past. The whole song--even the song's video--just made me completely uncomfortable. Despite that, I bought M&M immediately and went and saw Incubus at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009, marking my third experience with them in concert. Maybe I am biased against that concert because of the fact that I came home from it with the swine flu, but compared to the (now, a great many) other concerts I have been too, I maintain there was still something missing. Given I am the kind of person who naturally kind of assumes the worst...well, the whole experience made me feel very unhappy and almost unwilling to take the risk on Incubus again. What if this was the way they were going? I didn't want to contemplate the thought. So it was that I sort of held them at arm's length for a little while. I listened to the back catalogue, I tried to ignore the doubts in my mind. When Brandon announced his Ectoplasm show in Hollywood I went to see it--but found myself actively hoping I wouldn't meet this man I'd idolized for so long because I didn't think I could take it if he weren't what I'd thought he was. Unreasonable expectations, I know, but...even three years ago (ish) I wasn't the person I am now. All in all, this meant I'd make a reasonably significant mistake when The Wild Trapeze rolled around, but that left such a crater of an impact on me it rather deserves its own entry...