Performing Electronic Dance Music

Hello friends. I was having trouble wrapping my head around what ECM is going to be doing this semester, so I thought I’d try to write it out and make sense of it that way. Forgive me if some of what follows seems self-evident.

This is music that is often prepared before hand. Patterns are programmed, sounds are selected; the performances are crafted so that they can be performed by one individual or a reduced number of individuals. That’s a big theme of electronic music as a whole: music is made without the need for many musicians in a space playing together. To bring it back out into an ensemble seems to be going backwards, each person playing a single instrument, regardless if it's are electronic or not.

I know there are advantages to an ensemble, in that the music is less strict. When there is a single performer making dance music, they must prepare everything beforehand. Even their variations need to be planned in a loose sense so that the music will continue smoothly while they improvise or change up their sets. Many musicians mean that many aspects of the music can change quickly and smoothly in response to external influence, be it reacting to the crowd or the other performers or something else.

Still, I don’t know how we are going to perform this music. I can’t imagine we’re all going to sit around playing electronic drums and synths. But it also seems a little ridiculous to all sit around programming sequencers and twiddling with knobs. All of those have been done. Yet since we’re making dance music it’s going to have to be consistent and accurate, so it seems like some combination of those two ideas is going to have to happen. And that’s where I’m getting stuck.

Anyways, enough theoretical, here are a couple of videos and an article that I feel are relevant.

KiNK performs a live set with a single turntable and variety of electronics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77uuDVpsSo

And here’s an article I found about a duo called Hypnobeat that performs with old drum machines. I thought it was interesting, even if they claim to have “invented techno.”
http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?2359

A short video of a performance also.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0hN9v16V-U