Simon Rumble’s blog

I've been slack with blogging about gigs so I'll try to catch up. Just lived through a hectic weekend. In the Australian Summer there's always lots of gigs on as artists tour and play the festival circuit. We often end up with really busy times. This weekend was especially nuts.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. If you haven't seen them live, get on it. Their recorded music is very eclectic and can be challenging but live they're unbelievably fun with a lively crowd. Honestly I never thought they were my thing, then went to a show and now I'm hooked.

Saturday night was supposed to be some down time. Then our mates put us on the door for Throwing Muses at The Factory around the corner from our place so we dragged ourselves off the couch and ducked around.

We saw Kristen Hirsch on her last solo tour and she's a mesmerising performer. She's tiny but she fills the stage with presence and incredible songs. Amazingly we even got to meet her afterwards and she was gracious and funny, having to socialise with the promoter's rando mates. Absolute legend!

Sunday night rolled around and the one we've been hanging out for. Parcels. On the Sydney Opera House steps!

Fortunately the weather improved from the oppressive heat of Saturday to be cool and breezy. Perfect for a cool and breezy band, seemingly made for outdoor stages. Fantastic set of good vibes and fun times.

Only one gig in the coming weekend!

A few weeks ago we got a Tesla Powerwall installed, taking advantage of the price drop and the NSW government subsidy. I've signed up for Amber, who pass through the wholesale power price such that in the 19 days we've had it, we're $70 in credit having consumed nearly 400 kWh of power. Admittedly we've been using the air conditioners a lot to chew up free solar and keep the house pre-cooled during the hot days.

To get the most out of Amber, you need to be able to store power and predict when you will need it. Their SmartShift app does this for you, but you can control it crudely when you need to, for example tell it to not dump power to the grid on a night you know you'll need power, say to run the oven. Otherwise it automatically works it out, and it's been pretty good for that.

However, Amber can't currently control my Enphase inverter. You need to be able to stop your solar generating and exporting power to the grid when the power goes negative. Fortunately a guy in Melbourne has written a great little script that does just this. It monitors the Amber power price and when it goes negative tells the inverter to switch to an export profile that has "0 kW" set as the export limit.

The only problem, as reported here by another Enphase user, the Powerwall reacts so quickly to any loads in the house that the Enphase microinverters see essentially no load and don't produce any power. If your battery isn't already full, your house will drain from the battery and then once empty it'll use the grid. Using the grid when it's negative isn't a bad thing but draining the battery not so much.

So I worked with Brendan to work out where I could hook in a quick check to see if the battery is full, using Home Assistant. I don't know Ruby at all so Brendan was very helpful and patient.

Here's the diff you can run against the repository to make the required change. You'll need to create a long-lived API token in your Home Assistant instance and set that as ZEST_HOME_ASSISTANT_TOKEN, then find the URL for the battery charge level resource in the Tesla integration and set that in ZEST_HOME_ASSISTANT_URL. For mine that URL is http://<IP of HA>:8123/api/states/sensor.my_home_charge. That's it.

Thanks so much Brendan for helping me out!

With the instability in the grid these days pushing the spot prices up a lot I suspect I'll be able to pay off the battery much quicker than it'd be on a normal power plan, with the added bonus of us not having to worry about when we use power so much.

Not usually my kind of thing but my mate Damion was visiting from Melbourne and bought tickets for both nights and I'm always up for catching up with him and I'm a sucker for Opera House gigs. Cracking show and it's amazing how sprightly and nimble this 84 year old is! Lots of great tunes.

It's been a long time since I've been to a gig in someone's front room! This gig was advertised as a "secret" location and that turned out to be someone's terrace house in Redfern. Lots of fun as they played through all their tracks including some of their very early tracks.

There's a short list of bands that I'll see every time there's an opportunity. Nick Cave, The Cure, Billy Bragg, The New Pornographers and... Belle and Sebastian. Always a great night out and this was no different as they played the Enmore Theatre last week and played all the hits. Big singalong for The Boy With The Arab Strap with a bunch of the crowd up on stage. Loads of fun!

I did my second crack at sous vide pulled pork using Serious Eats' great recipe. First time was great though my smoker gave up soon after getting it going, so I finished it using a foil-wrapped packet of woodchips in the gas BBQ. Worked fine so I went all the way with that.

22 hours in the sous vide circulator, then a couple of hours in the BBQ with smoke. Brilliant. A crunchy, super tasty bark and unctuous, flavoursome meat. Brilliant taco filling! Nom.

I've been waiting for this band to come out for a couple of years, seeing them play Glastonbury and all the European festivals. Finally they made it to the Hordern Pavillion. Interesting crowd: lots of young women dressed up in lacy, flouncy outfits, a smattering of middle aged music fans like me, a huge bunch of the Sydney band members' family including her grandmother. Lots of fun!

Highlights: the cover of Sparks' This Town Isn't Big Enough For Both of Us (needed more gunshots) and the lead singer being convinced to do a shoey, for when you really need to cringe about Australian "culture".

This was a bit of an unusual gig. The Tank is a giant underground oil tank previously used for ship oil by the Navy. Now it's been repurposed as a gallery space under the Art Gallery of NSW's new modern wing.

For sculpture the space is incredible with dark corners, controlled lighting and a dramatic entry down white spiral stairs.

For music I think it's hard to get the acoustics right. It's a giant sealed box with vertical columns every few metres.

Genesis Owusu tried to make the space work for his sound, presenting a very stripped back version of his best songs. Not sure it worked though. It felt stilted and the tempos were off, when his music is usually boisterous and wild enough to break the floor.

Fun to see the space used differently though. It would work brilliantly for reverb heavy music: The xx or Portishead would be great. Dubby music perhaps?

Though what I really want is a rave in this space. Umek or Speedy J playing dark techno with a monster kick drum and minimal lighting. Perhaps a bit too wild for the Art Gallery?

Friday night rolled around and we had Melbourne band Mildlife at the Factory Theatre, conveniently around the corner from our place.

Normally I'd take my mate Gab to this gig but he was in Japan so Holly came along. Not really her thing: a bit too much on the jazz end of the spectrum for her. When the jazz flute comes out you know shit's about to get real.

But for me, this gig was heaven. Deep, funky bass-driven grooves and a band of great skill. Their music has elements of late 1990s French filtered house. In fact one of the tracks had a bass groove that could be Pnau's 1999 Mellotron. Other tracks reference Steely Dan and the vocals and synths evoke Alan Parsons Project.

Loads of fun. Holly actually went home early and missed their best track, The Magnificent Moon.