Gremlins in the Gears
A love letter to Murphy’s Law
MIDI Mob Collective · Xalphericon Chronicles
If you’ve ever watched a perfectly rehearsed plan disintegrate in real time, you know the specific flavour of chaos that visited Xalphericon this past Sunday. We didn’t just have a bad gig. We had a cinematic bad gig. The kind where you start laughing because the alternative is a full existential crisis in a parking lot.
Let’s run the tape.
The building wouldn’t have us
The venue scheduled a meditation session before our load-in. Peaceful. Serene. Completely incompatible with two musicians trying to haul gear in and stress-eat whatever snacks they brought. We stood outside, spiritually uninvited, watching the clock do exactly what clocks do when you need more time.
Noah’s mixer had trust issues
Once we finally got in, we discovered we’d forgotten the one RCA cable holding Noah’s entire signal chain together. Not a spare cable. The cable. The crucial one — laughing at us from the gear room at home while we stood in the venue with nothing to plug into nothing.
My compressor chose violence
My guitar compressor died mid-setup. No farewell. No warning light. Just silence where sound should be. We spent a chunk of our already-compressed (ha) setup time troubleshooting what was, in retrospect, a component quietly quitting on us like a disgruntled employee on their last day.
The projector and my iPhone had never met
Tested at home: perfect. Showed up to the gig: my iPhone had apparently never met this projector before in its life. They regarded each other like strangers at a party. I know I tested this. Technology does not care what you know.
And then there was the key
Before any of this — before the monks, the rogue cable, the compressor’s resignation — I lost the only key to my Volvo. So we rented a U-Haul van, loaded our gear into it, and drove it across town to play our set.
The audience of two
One couple showed up. Retired, friendly, genuinely kind people who clapped for us — and we appreciated every bit of it. After our set we got chatting and asked if they’d heard much electronic music before.
The lady thought about it for a moment and said: “You mean like Electric Light Orchestra?”
We smiled. We nodded. We died a little inside.
Bless them both. They had absolutely no idea what they were listening to and they clapped anyway. That’s more than most people do.
Gremlins don’t punch once. They pile on. They wait for you to fix one thing and quietly destroy two others while your back is turned.
Sunday was a masterclass in cascading failure — every safeguard stripped away one by one until we were standing in front of a projector that didn’t recognise us, playing for a retired couple who thought ELO was electronic music, having arrived in a rented van because our car key was somewhere in a parallel dimension.
But we set up. We played. We threw that gremlin in the blender.
Because that’s what you do. Not because it feels good in the moment — it doesn’t — but because the alternative is letting a dead compressor and a forgetful projector write the end of your story. And that’s a terrible ending.
We’d rather write a bad blog post about it instead.
See you at the next one. We’ll have the cable.
Xalphericon — MIDI Mob Collective