The version of Interior City’s opening song ‘Arrival in a Distant Land‘ that opens the first Garmonbozia record ended up defining how we played that song live. As such, I’ve decided to start releasing live videos of that song on a weekly basis so you can hear how it evolved over time. The video of our first performance (at Martyrs’, 10/5/15 with Sacha Mullin and Pavlov3) has been available for quite a while now:
To kick off this new video series, I recently released a partial video of the track from our second performance of the song, at Elbo Room, Chicago, IL, on Thursday, 3/24/16. We played with with Lybria, Sea Charms, Sacha Mullin, and Balkan Blue Band – a group specially invented to fill the show’s latest slot, as no one would take it (check out their set here!). Check that out below:
Both of these videos feature the initial live lineup of The Gabriel Construct:
Gabriel Riccio – vocals, keyboard
Sacha Mullin – vocals, keyboard
Sophia Uddin – violin, vocals
Jeff Siegfried – tenor saxophone, vocals
Bill Banks – guitar, vocals
Dante Kester – bass
Thor Bremer – drums
Our third performance (on May 20, 2016) already featured a somewhat different lineup. Jeff Siegfried departed, so we got a new sax player, Joel Moore. He left after this gig – I believe it was our last show with a sax player. We also added a second guitarist, Angelo Zaigirdar, who remained with us for quite a while, jumping between guitar and bass), expanding the lineup to an 8-piece.
The show took place at Harding House, a true haven for weirdo prog musicians. It was lovingly run by Rich Poston and Valerie Pallson, and we are still eternally grateful to them. We played alongside Justin Carter and The Mercury Tree. For this show, we decided to open things a little more abrasively – rather than start with a spooky mood and build things up, we immediately exploded into the first minute of Interior City’s closing song, ‘Curing Somatization’, before jumping into ‘Arrival in a Distant Land’s mysterious atmospheres. I think my scream at the start was perhaps more goofy than intended, but live and learn! As you can see in the thumbnail, The Mercury Tree’s drummer Connor Reilly enters the frame partway through the video:
What interests me so much about performances of ‘Arrival’ is that the song wasn’t as composed as my other material. It’s really a loose scaffold – some chords, a shape, a melody – that allowed the band to really do their thing. As such, I feel like it highlighted the players in my band better than most of the other songs in our set at the time.