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By tonight manwomanchild will be in Chicago. We spent yesterday crossing Pennsylvania (we put down in Hubbard, OH for the night) and today we will be crossing Ohio. More info later…and photos.

This may have been the best show I’ve ever been to. Actually. First, What Cheer? Brigade played: they were awesome as usual. Their set was outside. They moved around in the courtyard of RISD Market Square during songs. They ended up spending a good long part of their set up top a Toyota Corolla that had been made awesome with crudely painted skulls.

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Video:

Then the show moved indoors to the RISD Auditorium. Dan Deacon’s set began with a carefully orchestrated “wave” of finger snapping moving from one side of the audience to the other and then back and up into the seating areas before coming back down and around again. It got progressively faster as he directed the audience with his arms. This was followed by some equally choreographed waves of stomping; sort of audience “trust-building” exercises. At one point, we all got down on one knee and pointed at the sky and repeated after him…

The set itself was unbelievable. There were projections and lights and a crapload of people onstage. They had different visual motifs for each song and these were all manipulated to sort of “dance” with the music. There was a strobe light inside of a glow-in-the-dark skull that would go and off for different parts of the songs as well as several sets of lights that seemed to get triggered at different points.

Throughout his set, Dan played all sorts of logistical games with the audience, delegating tasks, etc. At one point the audience became a train that went out one set of auditorium doors and back in the other and in an endless loop. Drum sticks and plastic pails were handed out so the audience could drum along.

All around: awesome, awesome show. I couldn’t have been more inspired by everything I saw.

-RK

HEY EVERYONE. Welcome to the brand new manwomanchild website. I’m going to posting a lot here in the next few weeks: mainly songs, but also some little slice of life bits and pieces. Tonight we’re going to go see Magic People (from Boston) and Xerxes (from Providence). Should be awesome. I’ll try and take lots of photos.

Providence is beautiful and it feels like fall. The air is crisp and it bites at my fingers when I go down to take out the trash. I bought some Lillies as well as a few Mums–a Rhode Island falltime favorite–and their sweet fragrance fills the entire apartment (something I notice especially each time I emerge from the bedroom after having been in there working on music with the door closed). I spent the late evening going through old unfinished songs, splitting them up into folders with names like “bridges and choruses, etc.”