The Bus, Frenchmen St, New Orleans, USA, 7th November 2014 (am).

I was heading back along Frenchmen St around 1am after seeing Willie Lockett and the Blues Crewe.  There was a bus parked in a side street with the engine running.  Interesting sounds were coming from it and a young woman invited me in.

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Inside the bus was a whole different musical experience.  This is Interstellar Transmissions.  The inside of the bus provides a different and intimate social setting and the bus with its rounded roof probably has inherently good acoustics as well.

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At the far end of the bus is the band under stage lighting and with the visual effect enhanced by the reflections on the polished ceiling.

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Gavin Robert McGowen on the left plays guitars, William Jerome “Coda” at the right is on keyboards and Nathan Wilson on drums & percussion.

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Gavin later told me they used to turn up on the street at Frenchman Street and start playing.  They would pull a big crowd, drawing lots of people out of the venues.  Then the venues would complain and the Police turn up to move them on.  They are based in Austin Texas and already had the bus so in a stroke of brilliance they decided to modify it to double as a venue.

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They are an instrumental group and the closest associations I could think of were Rick Wakeman, Todd Rungren and Yes.  The describe their genre on Facebook as “Carnivalesque Shamanic Tribal Rock Fusion”.   You can listen to some of their music on Reverbnation.

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After a while, I started to concentrate more on the reflections.

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Gavin told me they were to return the next night and I was intending to return with a wider lens.  However, either I missed them or they were diverted somewhere else.

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