4:00 am, outside Salem, OR. Albany. Full moon, must stay awake, I’m driving.

My name is Trent. I drum for Head Like a Kite. Head Like a Kite is a band, a two piece. Indie electronics using sounds and sights of super 8 movies. We’re on a tour down the west coast, to San Diego and back. I’m going to be posting here, Line Out, reporting back from the lull gnawing road of Tourland. Strawberry Yahoo helps down the hours in a van. So do fantasies of knowing how to breakdance.

Sounds of Japanese DJ, Cornelius, pad my vertebrae as I become scroll eyed and make the window orange.

Played Portland last night. Place called The Towne Lounge.

The guitar player and the bassist from the opening band, Junkface, ended up wrestling each other around on the floor. They totally went at it. On top of their instruments. All tangled up in their chords and mic stands, screaming. A candle fell on them off a table they hit. Someone spit on them. They were wearing all white. Even white ties. A combination Butthole Surfers, Dead Milkmen, WWF. People were walking into the club and these two guys in white were on the floor yelling and rolling around on each other. They were on some sort of hallucinogen. They were pained in that way. One of them was yelling something about Telemachus and Ithaca. “Sacker of cities, slayer of Zeus.”� That’s Homer’s Odyssey. The guitar player was much bigger than the bass player and completely dominated him.

As a kid in Atlanta, I watched wrestling on TV. They filmed it at a high school gym, before WWF was big. Fourteen people in the audience. One of the wrestlers was “˜Abdullah the Butcher.’ They would lead him out on a leash and he would eat the padding out of turnbuckle. He was obese. He was a world champion. In Lithonia, Georgia.

It’s Juno keyboard, to SPDS drum pads, to KD8 kick pedal, to midi interface, to Ableton Live laptop. There are too many inputs. It’s too dark on the stage to see where I’m supposed to set up but there’s a goth chick with a pen light. Real goth. She says I can use the light if I play her in the house Clue game after the set. You know, Clue, like Professor Plum, in the observatory, with the lead pipe. I needed the light and lost at Clue. It wasn’t Professor Plum.

It came time for Head Like a Kite to play at Towne Lounge and there were no microphones. Someone in one of the other bands took the microphones when they finished. So we had an instrumental set. Looped the electric drums with analogue filters and took it into cookie snake pimp orbit. Love the loops. Invert the beat. Phaser divisibility. I tried to wrestle Dave and scream Odyssey quotes, but it didn’t work.

Got to the hotel and there’s an “˜Adult Shop’ across the street. Right off the highway. Always makes me feel better when there’s an Adult Shop close, in the middle of nowhere. Gotta get some sleep. Tomorrow the road. Sacramento. Sleep now. Feel like I’m still driving.

trent

(pictures by Marlon Schaeffer)