Instrumachines and the Evolution of Electronic Music Performance
bryank.imThere are big EDM artists that have really been pushing the envelop on what you can do in live performance for a while now. Deadmau5 specifically has a real obsession about trying to do everything live and it's obvious that this requires a large amount of musical and technical knowledge and talent.
Here is a video with him talking about his live set set up from 2010 and is a really interesting watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTCqeWu094I
I remember hearing somewhere that he has switch over to a complete live show since then, but I can't find a link to confirm this right now. Needless to say what he does is way more then just play some tracks that he made. Which is one of the reason he despises the term "DJ" to describe what he does.
Edit: He is also incredibly obsessed with the lights at his live show and handles the lighting including the rig himself.
I saw him play at Sasquatch in 2010 while walking back from the main stage not even intending to see his set (totally respect his talent and really enjoy the pieces he writes musically, but his genre just makes it unlistenable to me), and it was probably one of the most brilliant/memorable performances I've ever seen. I'm generally not impressed by random lighting setups because they're impersonal to the performance. Just set them up, have them go off at certain points of the music and you're done.
Everything on his stage was choreographed down to a T including his own movements, and when the crowd coos and freaks over every single detail (some of us not believing what we were seeing), it just makes it all the more immersive. Even knowing that he puts such detail into his shows doesn't prepare you for what you see. None of the videos I've found online even begin to do it justice.
I didn't get to see ISAM when it came through, but I'd be interested in seeing how they compare in fidelity.
He is uncompromising when it comes to the quality of his live shows. It's clear he cares a lot about them and is trying to master what he does. And wether or not you like his style of music I think that people need to respect that.
Absolutely. I would highly recommend everyone go to one of his performances at least once in your life, even if you think you'll need to put some earplugs in. I was way in the back and at 5'2 I can hardly see through a crowd, but standing on my tip-toes for an extra hour was beyond worth it.
Great topic!
Daedelus (http://daedelusmusic.com/) is one of my favorite artists, not only because of his tunes but because of how much fun he has just rocking on stage with his Monome/various toys, and how it faces it towards the audience to show what he's doing, even if that's a personal positioning preference. He's also in a documentary about circuit bending available on YouTube that's worth watching called Glitch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvlYM5Js450). Your ears won't thank you, but your geek will.
Other artists that are entertaining to watch fiddle with their digital instruments are Side Brain (hacks gaming peripherals to make music), No Sir E and the ever-wonderful Shigeto.
Here's such music you don't need to ignore.
you know, i remember being obsessed with this vid when it came out. i'm embarrassed i didn't work this into the essay. i might need to...
Wait, this is saying that a genre that was created through instrumachines — people playing a bunch of old roland x0xes, then later the sp-12s/1200s, then later MPCs, live — will somehow be revolutionized by the newer forms of the same instrumachines?
I think essentially the argument is that "laptops are not any fun to play live with" and really, that was just a short phase of electronic music. We all did that for a few years, then found our controllers, monomes, modulars, mpcs, etc. much more fun, and have just returned to what was already there. A laptop can be an instrumachine for the right artist with the right controllers (e.g., Daedelus and his monome http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCzHpQtNduE) attached to it, just as an MPC + SP1200 have been the right instrumachine for hiphop (KRS-One & BDP use one next to the turntables in every concert) for decades.
I'm not saying the earlier gen synths, controllers and laptops are any less legit than newer gen stuff. I'm thinking strictly from the fan's perspective, the non-musician's perspective, the concert-goer's perspective. That is, how visually obvious is your live performance gifts from the floor? To a digital musician, it might sound reductive. But live performance is it's own beast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqXayqIrAYE
=D
this goes back way before "the earlier gen synths, controllers, and laptops"
see my other comment. it's awesome you have come to this realization, but what i am trying to help you understand is that this is cyclical. it is not a revolution, it is how instruments evolve and has been for ages.
gotcha. yeah this vid is pretty crazy, down to the "Playing it by ear" bit.
Live performance is easily electronic music's biggest obstacle. A light show/projector is at the very least a needed default. Because a single man behind a controller/lappy is not that interesting.
^^ this summarizes what I;m trying to say probably better than anything I actually wrote.
The concept reminds me of the "synthe-axe drumitar" played by Future Man from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.
Two cool things to see on this topic: anything by beardyman (who uses a mic and processors to emulate just about any genre you want) and imogen heap's magical music gloves (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6btFObRRD9k)
I guess I'm getting old, but the demo both looks and sounds like a man virtuoustically playing a pair of typewriters.
More seriously, I think this is cool, but a little overblown in someways, we've technically been able to do this kind of performance (using sliced up digital samples) for a very very long time -- decades. Digital sample machines, of many kinds of forms have been used in live shows for a long time. Think of your favorite 80's new wave band and they probably had live shows with digital synth triggering samples off of a keyboard.
I think this is more of a cultural shift than any kind of technological shift, but interesting nonetheless. The methods of playing these things is much more akin to being a drummer or an old school DJ scratchoff than anything else. But just like complaints about all modern music being overcompressed, these guys have to work off of only two performance vectors: sick beats and cool samples. There's no dynamics in the performance or playing with tonality. Glissando, spicatto, breath control, tonguing, etc. are all right out the window.
Music has been reduced to learning and playback a la guitar hero. A generation of musicians, messing around with samples from music they themselves could never perform.
We talk a lot about technology we no longer have the means to make and knowledge lost in fires and wars and natural decay, and toy with that idea in sci-fi and real life. However, today we certainly have a much greater pantheon of fantastic accomplishments in these areas.
But I wonder if we should consider a similar phenomenon with culture and cultural skills? We may be entering a time were previous cultural knowledge, like how to play piano virtuostically is lost, exchanged with how to play a sampler at similar high levels of skill. We may have lost the means to transmit that culture forward to future generations, but outside of a vague sense of loss, nobody really cares because what we have now is also vast and complex and has its own set of interesting skills that need to transmit forward.
Is this the cultural equivalent of cleaning out the memetic closet to make room for new stuff?
Totally with you up until the lost culture thing. More people know how to play the piano virtuostically than ever. Culture is expanding and being recorded permanently in the digital world. How are we losing it?
It reminds me of what the blue-man-group does. It's novel, a few people make a lot of money doing it, but it's not the next electric guitar by any stretch.
I think one of the core attributes of EDM is that it is performed by machines. The MPC-live thing seems like an effort to step backwards just to have something to do on stage. I'd rather listen to someone mix a 808/909/303 live. The subtle timing and tuning shifts they make are a thing of beauty (and laptops don't do this). But that's probably just my preference for techno over hip-hop/dubstep coming through.
Anyway, good article regardless.
Yeah the 303 is a really interesting example, it offered several entirely interesting performance vectors, almost none of which were tied to actually playing the notes. Lots of people I know who used to do great 303 stuff barely even knew what the letter notes along the keyboard were. But the little knobs at the top gave them tons of ways to express the music that really aren't typical in traditional musical performance. (I'd have killed to have a freq cutoff and resonance cut off when I was studying classical violin).
"Is this the cultural equivalent of cleaning out the memetic closet to make room for new stuff?" To tell you the truth, yes. I make a few rhetorical leaps to get an argument across. I realize Araabmuzik is hardly the first midi controllist ever, he's but a bump in a continuum.
I disagree though with the 2 vectors thing. There's a whole lot of things you can do with tonality with machines. And as for "Glissando, spicatto.." etc, well, I personally think the human voice will be the one instrument that will always be "in".
Point being, I'm most excited to see all the different vectors these machines invent.
And sure, technically we've been able to do this for decades, but it's usually been a hidden process in the studio. It's the crossover to mainstream cultural acceptance and respectibility as a performance instrument. When hardware instrumenalists move tickets, that's what's interesting to me.
The grandfather of this exploration is Moldover and for the purposes of this discussion ignore his current tendecy to involve an electric guitar in his sets ... a recent development.
http://vimeo.com/moldover/live-at-future-everything-excerpts
He ended up designing and building his own controllers using arcade buttons.
Since this is hacker news I'll point out the whole investigation is largely a technology issue. Many studies have shown that expressiveness of great instrumentalists rests on incredibly small timing variations, which ARE NOT random. Because of latency and more especially jitter in the hardware/software interface true virtuosity is either very hard or impossible to develop using most currently available tools. What the actual acceptable level of machine induced random variations are is a much debated point. This is why I pushed Lippold Haken so hard to increase the sampling rate of the continuum fingerboard to its current sub-millisecond levels. The underlying technology of the madrona soundplane can be implemented at audio rate, which, by definition, should be fast enough to obviate this need.
I'm always mystified when I see people's fingers move that quickly. I can see myself typing on the keyboard, but it's a simple letter that comes out when I press it. It might just be that it's so normal that I don't think it's cool anymore, but people who can mix music like they type is just awesome to me.
Here's two more videos of people mixing/making cool music on the 'fly'
I am not a musician and I don't keep up with production methods too closely, but this method of "load a bunch of loops into your devices, trigger them in interesting manners" sounds almost EXACTLY like what I've read about the way Orbital has been working since somewhere in the early 2000s.
I think the only difference is that the price of these kinds of looping tools has dropped precipitously, so there's more people fooling with them.
(And I am not trying to disrespect the musicianship of people doing this. I'm just questioning it being a NEW THING.)
Not a new thing at all, you're right.
Sidenote, totally trivial, but in case you care: Orbital only recently (past 5 years) moved to Ableton as a control hub, but still use a ton of outboard gear. Before that they were running the rig off Alesis MMT-8s, and famous for doing so. Those would trigger loops, yes, but they would trigger those loops in samplers, which is why most orbital tracks loops are limited to starting, stopping, looping, and getting cut up a tiny bit, not much more. The MMT-8s are essentially step sequence loopers and arrangers, kind of the most frustrating form of what the MPC-style offers. But since they were masters of them, there was no reason to switch until something better (Ableton) came along.
I've actually had a very similar thought recently. I also feel like it is somewhat easier to master electronic music production (I know that it's still hard but compare how much one knows after playing piano for 6 months with learning Ableton for 6 months). I think that this is awesome since people will be able to concentrate on making interesting music as opposed to learning the instrument.
"I also feel like it is somewhat easier to master electronic music production (I know that it's still hard but compare how much one knows after playing piano for 6 months with learning Ableton for 6 months). I think that this is awesome since people will be able to concentrate on making interesting music as opposed to learning the instrument."
The thing is that Ableton isn't your instrument, it is just a way to arrange what music you've already created. If you're going software based you would have your synth(s) and then other plugins (VSTs) to modify your sound, each with their own learning curve. Then you would have to learn Ableton or whatever Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) you choose. Plus, since sounds are being created from scratch there is a lot to learn about the theory of sound so that you don't get frequencies overlapping. I know that I thought it would be really easy going into it, but I have found that it is much harder than it seems and I have a new found respect for those releasing their music.
Correct, but Ableton includes a bunch of instruments out of the box so when I said learning Ableton, I meant those as well. Furthermore, all the VSTs are not that conceptually different. Like yeah Massive and Sylenth1 are different but they still have an oscillator, envelope, LFO, filter and effects. And if you understand how synthesis works and know one well picking up the other is not that hard compared with say if you know how to play piano and want to learn to play the guitar.
For me, not having frequencies overlap falls under mastering which I consider to be kind of separate but related issue. If you wanted to be in a traditional (as in, a band with 'real' instruments), you'd still have to learn that to make your music sound good in addition to learning the instrument. And I still think that learning Ableton (+VSTs) is easier than learning to play a 'real' instrument. Minus maybe the bass guitar :-). It's definitely more fun which is why I might think that it's easier. But it is true that in electronic music, mastering is probably more important.
For anyone who's interested in this I can recommend this free book http://noisesculpture.com/how-to-make-a-noise-a-comprehensiv... (they ask for your email).
Well that's encouraging. I might need to pick me up an Abelton.
Yeah, I've been dabbling with it for like 1.5 years but got more serious in the last 6 or so months and it's fucking awesome once you get over the initial hump. Also /r/edmproduction/ is your friend. And look into Tom Cosm's tutorials. Feel free to email me (it's in my profile) if you want to talk more.
Also revolutionized (seen that long before) the street music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a1dHCmcJzg
Controllerism has been around for awhile. I discovered it via Moldover -
http://www.youtube.com/user/moldover
Before him, it was called "live pa"
thanks for clearing that up. Controllerism does not seem to be all that new to me.
'electronic dance music' does not seem to be all that new to me. I'm amused by the idea that something popular in Europe for decades which originated in US alternative cultures is only now catching on in US mainstream culture.
What's even more amusing is that sentiment ("electronic music is now catching on") finds its way up every decade.
That's just a crappy sketch but i'm sure someone could flesh it out further. The reality is that it's a continuum, things go in and out of style, what's popular changes, the audience changes, but the music never really goes away, we/you/i just don't know about it. Dubstep is simply the hair metal (80s), grunge (90s) of the times, not a statement about electronic music's popularity or unpopularity.80s -> Disco & House -> Pop, New Wave 90s -> House -> Pop 00s -> Electro & DnB -> Pop, Hiphop 10s -> Dubstep -> Pop, Hiphop
Hey guys, I wrote this thing. And I know there must be disagreements with the arguments here. Bring it on!
Sure. Its actually going backwards. Back to a focus on the performer as a simple human who does feats, macho virtuosity and does crowd conscious manipulations.
What electronic music opened up is much larger. Music is internal, electric (like our central nervous systems) and cosmic. The focus is in the body and mind of the people experiencing it. Its in the speakers and on the dance floor. The composer disappears, the audience disappears, the technique disappears (and all that thinking about "is the performance technically accurate/innovative ?")
As soon as you put some clown on the stage all the beauty evaporates and people stand around yelling "woot" and generally not dancing. Or if they do it involves fist pumping and making rock faces.
As soon as you put a live musician in the track then you start thinking about technical execution and about what the musician is feeling and thinking. It limits it. I love live musicians (I majored in Saxophone, I have a piano in my room here), but I just want to point out that the revolution of electronic music is that we took music past the limits of performance.
Its pure sound, pure feeling.
Also you should realize that even jungle, juke, IDM, breakcore are often written with furious fingers and lots of live tweaking. And AraabMuzik is using the auto rolls all the time and he has breaks that set the pace. And he has the dynamics turned way down so its actually pretty hard to make a mistake. Turntablists like Q-bert are a thousands times more impressive. Listen to Sabar drumming and forget about the simple boom bap and cheap rolls that AraabMuzik is doing here. Jungle at its peak twisted the mind with intricate rhythms that really blew minds.
And people have been doing crazy live electronic performance for ooooh.... 60 years now. We used keyboards and drum pads and MPC/SP type machines.
I gotta say, I agree with this post. Grandstanding != musical In fact it is regressive. It is actually theater disguised as music.
> Jungle at its peak twisted the mind with intricate rhythms that really blew minds.
You can't just throw something like that out there and not make recommendations ;)
I gotta admit, I can't stand about 98% of EDM, but some small amount of it actually is really good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT9wUifJ-hQ
> You can't just throw something like that out there and not make recommendations ;)
here's a podcast full of hive, tech itch, etc.
http://www.mixcloud.com/lars-mion/unashamedly-nostalgic/
This stuff was all done with intricate editing before izotope, audio damage, etc. had one-button tricks to stutter and mangle.
Noisia, Phace, Rockwell, etc. are leading the new charge on d&b. Amazing shit.
Ok, I have to admit that didn't really do much for me. I need a little bit of melody... think more along the lines of like Massive Attack or vintage Jamaican Dub.
for virtuosity and density there's Remarc Thunderclap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS3hPo81BKw
for pure beauty, Photek The Rain:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYsY4wYMQe8
be sure to sit back and listen and wait for the bass to drop ;)
some beautiful mind juggling from Remarc:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I09dIBsU80
listen to that and try to figure out where your attention is focused. that's not something that fingers do in real time, its like hitting the hyperspace button and writing beats on more than one dimension at the same time. that's tracker music. the software looks like VIM.
Sabar drumming from Senegal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWd8n1kK0F0
try to figure out how those beats and changes are structured. Its very precise. They count interesting number series and there are polyrhythms that are very hard to notate in western music.
yes yes yes yes yes and also yes.
Actually, I mostly agree, despite going in thinking I wouldn't. Girl Talk is terribly boring live. There are many better, more creative artists in the EDM world. Araabmuzik as mentioned, RJD2 is a genre bending turntablist/synth junky/live performer, Pretty Lights mashes buttons on a monome and plays live with a drummer, and I think The Hood Internet does much better mash ups and has a better live show than Girl Talk (though they don't do the instrumachine thing so much).
I don't think I fully agree with 'the assumption that electronic music is the future'. It will be part of the future, but analog/traditional instruments will always be around, and will always be a significant portion of what music is created and what music is listened to.
Instrumachines aren't necessarily new, I'd even say the original electronic synthesizers of the 60s and 70s fall into the category. The just evolved into things with keyboards so they kind of got lumped into the 'instrument' category. I was glad you brought up turntablism, another example.
I mostly agree with you here, I think we're just starting from different starting points. The "electronic music is future" thing is sort of a counter statement to the idea that EDM is a trend. My only argument is that electronic music will only dig it's claws into popular music. I'm not suggesting that analog instruments die completely. At least I hope not.
I know the synths are a good example of a legit hardware instrument. From the fan's perspective though, it largely mimics the skill of a pianist (even if you upload crazy other sounds into the keys). I'm more interested when we start respecting performers who play instruments conceived entirely in the digital era, with very little vestigial leftover from the analog instruments. Just the concept of that is cool to me.
As for RJD2, that's a big omission on my part, I was such a huge fan in the early 2000s. And also PL, more recently.
The issue is not that controllerism & live manipulation of machines is a new phase of musical performance, it is that the technology available to electronic musicians has matured to where the advantages of CPUs, GBs of sample storage, live DSP, etc. now have physical controller counterparts. This is nothing new, it is a cycle we have seen repeat through instrument design (actually all production, e.g., printing presses required fixed type, whereas freehand allowed expression) for centuries. With each technological advancement, improvisation and flexibility narrows to meet the constraints of the technology, then expands to meet the needs of those using it. Repeat.
But can you really dance to it? Is it fun to those just listening?
My first impression is that this is just a vain and boring exhibitionism of technical virtuosity, like those fast and boring guitar players (Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, etc) or those endlessly screaming pop divas (Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, etc.) just to show off.
I'd be curious to know if you create music or are just a listener. It's easy for someone who doesn't actually write music to write off a lot of that as "boring exhibitionism". But if you watch those guys play or talk about music, a lot of times you genuinely get the feeling that that's just what they hear it in their head. It's just how music is supposed to be to them.
I'm a guitar player myself, and don't really care for Vai/Satriani type stuff; there's just something missing. I have been getting into some more recent progressive shred and am having a hard time finding anybody that seems to really be pushing the genre forward as much as Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes. Both are extremely talented and just seem to "get it". Another guy who is right up there is Paul Ortiz. He's got some pretty serious keyboard chops, too.
See also turntablism, trading solos in jazz, and Paganini.
true, it's definitely a different kind of experience. I don't necessarily think the dance culture will diminish. But I do think there is space for the virtuosic in EDM... or maybe I should say EM ;-)
WMF is coming up soon. Have you been in the last couple years or going this time? I haven't been in about 6 years since I moved from Miami to SF. Curious to see how things have changed. When I was at the fringes of the scene back then, the tools that are being used for this style were just starting to come into vogue.
Also, I've seen a few performances where iPads were being used in a similar fashion to decent effect. Not sure which software was used. What are your thoughts on that? The machines these guys are using cool, but essentially still hardware. We are at a point now where an artist can commission a unique instrumachine purely in software that runs on tablets or just regular laptops. This reminds me of classic musicians throughout the ages who either invent their own instruments, or commission artisans to build them.
I'd like to see more examples of people using these tools to control acoustic-seeming sounds. The tech intrigues the geek part of me, but the sounds don't agree with me (I mostly have a piano/classical/jazz background).
Wow. That music is incredibly annoying.
To each their own. However, it helps if you define which music you find annoying. There are 3 distinct styles of music being mixed in those videos. Araab's was one I enjoy. #2 was ok, #3 sounded bad and the guy looked like a 3 year old hitting blocks into a Fisher Price toy. Had no sense of the skill level executed by Araab and #2.
LOL, well didn't I say ignore the music itself?
I like it. Just saying.
Aww, it's so sweet! Whatever next? DJ's learning to play an instrument?
A lot of EDM artist do play instruments. A lot of them grew up with classical training in the piano and to a fairly high level.