Neural Soup

Saratoga Mountain Winery, June 27, 2007

Finally, my music dry spell is ended! Tonight I had the unexepcted privilege of seeing an incredible guitar duo, Rodgrigo Y Gabriela. A friend of mine from work’s concert buddy got sick and boy did that make me one lucky fellow.

The Saratoga Mountain Winery is definitley one of the great venues of the Bay Area, if you haven’t had an opportunity to see something there, you should. It’s a small venue, 600 or so people, 1000 at most, built into the side of a hill, that is also (you guessed it) a winery. I forgot how nice the view is, since it overlooks the whole Silicon Valley, and when the day is clear you can see the whole of Silicon Valley, hills to hills. It’s quite a pretty sight, sorry no pictures.

If you don’t know them, Rodgrigo y Grabriela are a guitar duo from Mexico, that left the Mexican Thrash Metal scene (which Rodrigo described as VERY underground) and went to Ireland, where by performing on the street they hit upon a delicious blend of thrash metal energy (and even the songs) with awesome, usually flamenco style acoustic guitar. (Gabriela described it as thrash metal confused by flamenco, but they do not call what they do flamenco guitar.) At any rate, one thing led to another, and boy am I glad it did. Their energy is something to really take in… Gabriela plays mostly rhythm, and goes off with all kind of percussion she plays beating on her guitar with her hands and knuckles. It’s so amazing to watch…. there’s so much percussion coming out of dos guitarras you simply can’t believe it. Rodigro is an amazing lead guitar play in his own, and the combination makes something truly awesome.

This was really the first time I had ever heard them, and let me tell you, they’ll blow you away. Highlights from their set include, “Wish You Were Here”, Metallica’s “Orion” and “One”, their famous resurrection of “Stairway to Heaven” and of course a some original stuff which I don’t yet know the names to. They do a bunch of audience participation, and more then once had various sections of the audience snapping and clapping different rhythms. My favorite though was Wish You Were Here… you see, they don’t sing a word… so the whole audience did the singing for the song… and it wasn’t half bad, and it was wicked fun… buncha drunk music lovers belting out “So, so you think you can tell….” was awesome.

So it was an awesome show… tonight they are playing up in the Fillmore, and I only wish I could see them there too, at my favorite venue yet. You should definitely check these guys out… you won’t regret it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Adventure, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.