Okay, I may have been a little busy recently. A great (albeit short) tour with Spesus Christ, a wonderful show at work and tons of equipment brought back to life, including a Rhodes Mark I student console, a few pedals, and a Casio CZ-1000, reunited with my synth family in the photo. Those CZ series synths are seriously powerful within their little 80's world - the waveform options alone are pretty astounding... add on top of that the 8-step fully programmable envelope, MIDI and a pretty nice filter, and you have quite a tool, especially for less than $100 (on average). No aftertouch, but that's what the CZ-5000 is for...

Preparation for the Spesus Christ tour was a blast, and got me into full roadie mode, building XLR cables, preparing rackmount systems, and compiling sets of spare parts for vintage gear - things I honestly enjoy perhaps a bit more than I should. There's a sense of accomplishment in knowing you have built a tour-able system that can really put up with some abuse (with some attentive care) and most importantly, that it is a system which will help a group of musicians (myself included, in this case) put our best foot forward.

It's been an especially long time since I've posted, so this will be new to any readers who don't know me personally; I performed a set of my own music for the first time a couple months ago; there is related audio and video at matthewjosephpayne.muxtape.com