Return visit to Bruton’s best kept secret. The room at Octopus is really special, and it might explain why, when things went horribly wrong about eight minutes in, I felt comfortable enough to just roll with it :)

The purist in me had been keen to see whether this case could run entirely off its own power. OP-XY has a long-lasting internal battery, and the little controller keyboard connected to it can run from that too. Torso S4 and NTS-3 both run off power banks, leaving just the TE Sidekick mixer, which takes AAA batteries if you decide you want to.

I decided I did.

I will not be deciding that again.

They’d been absolutely fine in practice, lasting for hours, but I must have knocked the switch on while the case was packed, or at some point during the day, because they died spectacularly shortly into the set.

Thankfully I’d packed another pair, so I swapped them out while having a nice chat with the audience about the thrill of live performance.

The strange thing is that the calm I felt in that moment ended up being the real highlight of the night for me. A hangover from Sebastian Mullaert’s retreat, or from reading Kenny Werner the week before? Who knows. But being able to stay there, rather than panic or fight what was happening, felt significant.

The long Italo-ish track at the end is something I put together the day before, and features a sample from an interview I found with a regular attendee at Mancuso’s Loft.