Pilcrow

Atom™, playing the Decibel Opening Party showcase at Re-Bar

My Flickr Pro account expired early in October, right when I was flat broke and couldn't afford to renew it. A free Flickr membership has restrictions on uploading photos, and will only display the 200 most recently uploaded photos, so I didn't bother trying to upload my Decibel Festival photos until I renewed my Pro membership. Well, with all the financial juggling I've been doing to try to catch up on my various late accounts and also cover my regular expenses, I didn't bother renewing my Pro membership until yesterday. So yesterday evening I finally went through my Decibel Festival photos and uploaded the ones I felt were worthwhile.


Ladytron, playing the Sinthetic showcase at the Showbox at the Market

I started out with 150 photos, which is a small amount relatively speaking. But I hadn't bothered to try taking lots of photos this year, for a couple reasons. For one, this year KEXP had a small and moderately well-coordinated group of bloggers and photographers attending the shows, so I expected that between KEXP's own photographers and the official Decibel Festival photo pool, I would have enough good photos to use for the blog posts. For another, although I once again borrowed Gina's fairly decent digital camera, I wasn't actually getting very good results in a lot of venues. Generally the venues were so dark that even putting the camera on the nighttime setting wasn't enough to make up the difference, and I was reluctant to use the flash as I wasn't expecting good results with it and also felt that it was inappropriate for me to do so as an unofficial photographer (and I had a vague idea that at least some venues were restricting the pro photographers from using flash). As a result, after I'd sorted through my photos and discarded the ones that I felt weren't worthwhile, I ended up with a set of just 36 photos, which you can see in my Decibel Festival 2011 set on Flickr. 


Amon Tobin (hidden inside the largest cube in that structure), playing the Red Bull Music Academy Presents showcase at the Paramount Theatre

Fortunately I was able to get some decent photos of Amon Tobin's amazing stage set for his ISAM Live production, as you can see in the previous photo. Unfortunately, static photos can't begin to do justice to just how cool and amazing it was to see the video projected onto the building-block structure that produced a realistic three-dimensional effect without glasses. As far as I'm concerned, this is as close as we can come with traditional two-dimensional video to the ideal of true three-dimensional holographic projection. 





You can still read my KEXP Blog post about the Amon Tobin showcase, as well as my post on the Opening Party. Unfortunately, with all the things I had going on in October, I was never able to make time to get any more posts written about Decibel Festival for the KEXP Blog. However, I will still try to make time soon to do a brief write-up of the rest of Decibel Festival here on my blog. 


Kid Hops, playing the Onset showcase at the Baltic Room