L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

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The Point of the Needle

May 22, 2008 on 8:26 am | In Backstage Pass, General Musing, Music |

We (Balkanarama) played the closing party for the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. I didn’t give it too much thought - a gig for a bunch of engineers. But when I mentioned it to friends the consistent reaction was “How cool is that?”

Pretty cool it turns out.

First of all, it was at the top of the Space Needle:

Our backdrop was a panoramic view of Seattle from the Cascades to Puget Sound. Loading in was a time consuming and somewhat sobering experience. We were definitely the hired help here - not rock stars (though the service elevator has as good a view as the tourists). We’d been told we could leave our cars with valet parking for free but valet parking had an attitude and the attitude was “Why should you park free when you gettin’ paid?”

Then there was the event. It wasn’t just a bunch of engineers. It was over a THOUSAND engineers from all over the world. I’ve never seen a more international collection crammed into one room. (And crammed they were - the Observation Deck of the Space Needle is not THAT large.) The elevators disgorged them in heaving, camera-wielding masses. Today there are there are a thousand tiny flash drives wending their way homeward with pix of us snuggled into their recesses.

Ferko came prepared with a slew of new band names for us based on the session titles from the ISCAS symposium:

The Circuit Breakers
Turbo Trellis and the Decoders
Tony Memory and the Flip-Flops
Blind Signal Lemon and the Wavelets
Low Power Logic

Votes?

Balkanarama at the Space Needle
Then there was the response. We played songs from eight or nine different countries and for every one, someone was astonished. The first was a man from Serbia who looked like he was mentally pinching himself most of the evening. We sang his favorite song and handed him the mic.