Monday, January 12, 2015

Performance thoughts and some tunes

In researching the subject, it seems like most techno producers equate stepping up their live game with increasing the scale and immersive nature of visualizations to their music. Amon Tobin created this wonderful box installation and Squarepusher used a live rig involving many black and white shapes on flat surfaces when he toured his latest album ufabulum (which I got to see at DEMF which was really awesome).

The challenge for us is to make a live element involving the creation and manipulation of sound more than just precomposing a pretty companion visualization - I have not found many successful examples of this excepting maybe Ryoji Ikeda's tuning fork sequence in Superposition or a time when I saw someone pour barbecue sauce on their sequencer at A.D.D. fest.

An idea that comes to mind as a response to this is to make there be a game-like element to how we determine sequences, like a piece that involves the game breakout to determine the drum patterns on a visualized step sequencer.

Another idea that comes to mind is to use the mechanistic and fixed nature of music to demonstrate a dynamic between humanity and automated processes, like two people having a conversation and having their conversation eventually being interrupted and gated by a snare drum pattern, making their words sporadic and out of context to mean something very different. Just an idea -

And here are some pieces of music that could qualify as techno (?) which I think are special:
RP Boo's "Speakers R 4" (minimalistic 160 bpm Chicago Juke)
Instra:mental's "When I Dip" (blown out electro, sounds great on huge speakers)
Underworld's Born Slippy (spoken word over techno created on a machine with very minimal sample time)

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