The Sunbeam Tour

The Sunbeam Tour

Touring bands keep an archive like this: one page per show, a number, a date, a venue, a setlist logged track by track, and at the bottom a tally of what got played the most across the run. This is that archive, kept for a different kind of act — a house cat, working a residency across six rooms over June, backed by no one, reviewed by no one, and occasionally cancelled by the artist on arrival.

Every date, venue and track below is invented, and every number attached to them — the running time of a set, the count behind “most played,” the tour’s total logged runtime — is computed from that invented data at build time rather than written in by hand. The Meow Overture really was counted across every night it opened; nothing here is a guess dressed up as a statistic.

Reading a night

Pick a show from the list on the left; its poster and setlist open on the right, title by title, timed the way a real setlist archive times a set — from the first note to the last. ↑ ↓ step between shows from anywhere in the list, Home / End jump to the first and last date. A track’s second line, where it has one, is the same kind of note a fan-run archive adds to a real one: not a lyric, just what happened — a first performance, a change of arrangement, an interruption nobody scheduled.

The poster bills the night by length

Every date gets its own flyer, printed in the same two plates as the rest of the sheet, and nothing on it is drawn by hand: each poster is that show’s data, set as a gig poster sets it.

A bill is ordered by importance, so this one is ordered by the only measure of importance the archive actually holds — the longest track of the night headlines it, the second longest takes the support slot, and everything else goes into the small print at the bottom of the bill. That puts Sunbeam Chase over the Windowsill date at more than two hours, and reduces The Slow Blink, four seconds long, to four words in the bottom line. The setlist beside the poster keeps the same tracks in running order, so the two columns disagree about the same night on purpose: one says what was played when, the other says what it was really a show about.

Above the bill is the night’s set shape — one bar per track, in running order, encores in the fluorescent plate. The heights are logarithmic, which is not a flourish: a set containing both a four-second track and a two-hour-eleven one has no readable linear scale, and the log keeps the short tracks visible while leaving the order of the long ones intact. A track nobody managed to time is printed as an open bar rather than a guessed height — there is exactly one, and it is the night the artist refused to come down off the fridge.

The cancelled date gets a poster too. It is the same flyer with the bill taken out and an overprint across it, which is what happens to a real poster for a show that did not occur — the paper is already printed by the time anybody knows.

Mark	Meaning
No.	Position in the tour, in booking order
Encore	Performed after the set proper, timed separately
Walk-off	How the artist actually left the stage, when it wasn’t a bow
— in the time column	A track whose length could not be established
Solid bar on the poster	One track, at its length
Fluorescent bar	That track was an encore
Open bar	A track nobody timed

One date on the tour has no setlist at all. The Vet Carrier show was cancelled by the artist on arrival, which a real archive would also mark as a blank page rather than quietly delete — a tour is the shows that happened and the ones that didn’t.

What the tour adds up to

The three figures at the foot are the reason the data lives in one place instead of six separate pages: a logged runtime across every played night, the most played title once every “(Reprise)” and “(Extended Mix)” is folded back into the song it varies, and the longest night by the clock rather than by memory. Change a date, add a show, cancel another — cancelling being, on this tour, well within character — and all three figures follow without anyone re-adding them by hand.