yOya

Well, this is just the week that all the bands I used to play with are coming into Boise! So, my last post was about the band King Washington. Coincidentally, I was playing with both them and yOya around the same time, the week that I moved to Boise they were embarking on a tour together, and this week they are separately touring through Boise. Good times!

I remember that the first time I saw them was when they were sharing the stage with King Washington (whom I'd just started playing with, at the time). In fact, Alex (from yOya) ended up producing KW's album The Overload. The point there is that music is incestuous.

But anyway, the cool thing about playing for these guys was that they were 100% synthetic percussion. No drummer, but a lot of drum stuff happening. When I first started working with them, Alex sent me song files with the drums and percussion bits all exploded so I could figure out what the hell was going on in the tracks. Over a couple of weeks we reconstructed it all to figure out what I would be playing on acoustic drums, on sampling pads, and what would remain in the box to be played via tracks. It was a lot of fun going through that process. 

Playing live was a great challenge. Mostly for the simple fact that, when you're hardwired to tracks, you can't stray one iota from the metronome, otherwise things sound out of time and messy- like the percussive version of being badly out of tune. I had been used to doing that with some of the past bands I'd worked with, but never on such an intense and inflexible scale. It made for a ton of fun to really make the beats come alive, without feeling too sterile and robotic.

Anyway, the guys are rolling through Boise on Thursday the 5th at Neurolux, and they just released a great single, totally worth checking out. Here's the original write-up on the single via Consequence of Sound.