Goodbye Ryan Emmett

On April 27th there was a big party at Roup for Ryan Emmett who was leaving Pittsburgh in a couple of days.  Some bands played and there was supposed to be dancing; it was also the one year anniversary of Wild Raft Records, the CD-R label of amazing a cappella artist and rouper Brian DiSanto.

Brian DiSanto had a cool cake for the anniversary; I am not sure who made it, but it had layers of cake interspersed with layers of icing and donuts.  Regardless, he ended up eating it during his especially raucous set in the Roup basement in front of a group of somewhat unprepared onlookers.  Other people ate some cake, but most of those that it was offered to turned it away, afraid to catch some sort of viral Roup disease that causes insanity.  Brian played mostly his fastest, hardest songs and moshed around.  My recorder got knocked over and a glass broke and everything got wet, but it was really cool.

When we emerged back into the sunlight of the upper floors we were greeted by masks matching our hero's face.  Everyone put one on and suddenly there were 200 times the standard amount of Ryan Emmetts.  Ryan himself was surprised to see so many doppelgangers.

©Pam Hanlin 2012

I played a set in the basement next after some DJing by Darrell.  It was the first set with my new Synsonics guitar.  It was really cool, but not loud enough, also the setup took twice as long as the actual set.  I used my weird guitar to generate feedback by playing a certain note that can sustain forever.  A contact microphone was also used to do similar things that were less musical.  No-wave solos and sludge riffs followed enshrouded in chorus and echoes.

Next, in the foyer, Seth did a drawing lecture about what he learned about hip hop and Latino music while working at the Exchange in Market Square.  Apparently modern rappers love spooky beats, while the Latino music tends to be happier and usually about the sun.  Presumably this was a metaphor to indicate that he was pleased at switching jobs from a CD store to a restaurant (I think it is Peruvian?) but who knows.  The power kept going out while he talked about Tha Carter IV and arm tattoos and boat shoes and low wages; crazy stuff.

Fogged Out started to play towards the end of Seth's lecture.  He was really good, but I didn't stick around for the whole thing.  Lo-fi pop/noise/rap stuff full of melancholia and baritone vocals with an 80's kind of tone/vibe; sometimes it is even like Trogpite a little bit.  I like his more poppy stuff the most, though I don't know the names of the songs.  The cover(I don't know the original artist or even the song title) is especially good.

That was it for this party.  There was a lot of dance/techno/industrial stuff played in between acts and afterwards, but I didn't really listen to it too much.  Ryan left soon afterwards for Colorado to explore the untamed wilderness or something.  He's coming back soon.