live electronic music and the laptop

I suggest hooking up foot switches that allow you to stomp to start a digital sequence. Just wire it into where the left click of a mouse would be.. use the mouse to get to the right spot on the screen and then jump on the switch to get it started.

The only salvation for this 'problem' of yours is perhaps projections, syncronised or not syncronised. Of course, this doesn't cover your desire for physical gestures resulting in sound, only, in rare cases, sound resulting in digital visualisational response, which at times can get a bit tedious.
So if you are looking for this kind of thing, maybe you should go to solo acoustic guitar performances and watch intently at some fuckhead crooning and using all his physical energy to express his potent feelings, and not listen to glitch.

to make this a related post, Fehlmann and Kid 606 are the only live laptop shows worth watching, imo

>Aren't most laptop artists just mixing when they're "playing live"?

usually, but not always. and 'just mixing' can entail quite a lot.

Overall its more of a challenge: if you give the punter nothing to look at then its all down to sound construction and the 'right' accoustics (sp?) to deliver.

at the end they performed an improvisation section together. both were playing melodicas and they created this dense wall of treated sounds and played very well off each other. it was really an amazing show--started at midnight at tonic. very otherworldly and engaging.

that said plenty of laptop types can be boring. i was not super into emil beaulieu (sp?) when i saw him...nobukazu takemura often has some visuals to go along with his playing which is interesting (and necessary, i think sans visuals he might not have been that great).

agreed that multi-player interaction can make things better. saw an awesome jim o'rourke (laptop) / christian marclay (broken record player) duo that killed.

I think this is usually the case...if you're talking about any really tricky drumming for ex., all the work is really done with tiny finger motions. A lot of the rest of it is show (which is important!).

That said, I DO think it's important to have some kind of visual element when you go to the trouble of seeing someone instead of listening to the record. Even with jazz shows, they may not be doing scissor kicks but there is still the pleasure of seeing how someone physically connects to their instrument. Even if I love listening to it at home, I don't know how much I would enjoy a show that was *just* a dude and his laptop, but it seems like there are plenty of ways to make it interesting (as above).

The live set for one of the bands I'm involved in is primarily laptop-based. Laptop plus guitar plus bass plus two vocalists. I'm planning on some solo shows in summer which will be me plus laptop, my main touring live set will be based around one of the beasts and I've got a good working knowledge of a handful of other acts who work this way.

FWIW this is what we use

http://www.coastaltown.nildram.co.uk/jim/robinsetup.jpg

Like anything you get virtuoso's, adequates and chancers. The difference comes in levels of control and how you use them. There are as many different Midi controllers as bands, and to me how you externally control the laptop is key. Waggling a mouse just don't cut it. (Neither does having a load of cool looking boxes on stage and simply running a CD like someone I saw recently).

It's still early days for all this (believe it or not) and theres still not many pieces of software that are built to do live work. Alberton goes some of the way, but only for a specific approach. Packages like Reason can alright to use live, but they are obstensibly software for home/studio use and there are always niggling problems and inconsistencies. I think that not one, but a lot of new packages need writing with live electronica in mind as pretty much everyone who uses software to make music has a different approach. It's very hard to impose an individual style onto arbitary programs, so flexibility and customisation must be the way forward.

Having said this, though, there are a lot of laptop kids out there and they need promotion so I'm willing to forgive them to a certain extent if they are just doing mouse clicks. There's a strong case that if that is the absolute maximum of real-time human interaction a piece of music ever going to have, then that is how it should be performed. There's a lot of these kind of philosophical questions that electronica brings up, the way it fits into the gig structure is a huge one. Gigs are a very old concept that were made for something else. How electronica adapts to that environment is a fascinating ongoing debate that you can watch from gig to gig and artist to artist .

OK, so here is a question for ya...

I've been making all my music on a laptop lately. But to play it live, I would probably plug in a firewire keyboard, and improvise/play along on top of my loops using a synth synthesiser. Is this acceptible? Or should I programme all of my leads and just mix them in and out like everyone else does? Is there another way to keep the free/spontaneous feel of music, even if it's coming from a laptop? What would you geeks think of this process, should you see it live? Another tosser pretending to "play a laptop live" or an acceptible solution to the live/prerecorded dilemma?

T.Raumschmiere plays live through his powerbook. He makes up for it by being a mentalist.

He has a portable sampler which may or may not be linked to the machine to fire things. He then proceeds to run around, whack it about, and climb the amp racks etc. Probably one of the best live shows I have seen to be fair.

Look at it this way - if something has been programmed it has been programmed. It has never been and never will be a live piece of music. By imposing performance you're compromising the integrity of the music. If we take away the impositions of gigging then I don't see why putting the actual kit on stage and pressing play isn't a valid artistic statement. It's the rawest the track could ever be, the closest to his source, and see as how we live in the digital age . . . . Let's not forget that by making music on a computer you are using the tools of business to make art. It's never happened before and as a commentary on the time we live in it's pretty spot on and vital.

But, hey, if we is artists then we also is whores too. Gigs are gigs and they need doing. Kate - just look at what the work you've got and think about what it does and decide how you would like to interact with it. Find a way to do it that is pretty streamlined and simple and hey presto, you have a giggable setup that is at least conceptually valid even if those beery tossers at the bar think the computer is doing everything.

A midi controller makes it easier to play and "look" more like a instrument because it looks like a keyboard.

Electronic music can comprise many different small bits that it would take an orchestra to play totally live, I'd like to see the correct score for sample based music i'm sure its interesting.

I think vocals and some sort of instrument control are the key if they are live then do whatever else you want on the laptop.

So depending on the gig/venue you plus a laptop with a midi controller and live vocals would be great.

Squarepusher was interesting enough live he played live bass did computer work and that was it, make sure the music is interesting enough for it not to seem like karaoke or a DJ set.

It's not expensive, cause we've already got the firewire keyboard. I used to play live guitar over the top of the laptop, but that was when someone else was operating the laptop, it would be almost impossible to do both unless everything was sequenced. It's easier with a keyboard.

Have been observing these sorts of situations. I mean, saw Sonic Boom last night, and he stood with his back to the audience twiddling knobs all night, but since his GEAR was what people were most interested in anyway, it worked.

The band that "opened" for him, it was these 3 guys with one laptop between them, and they just sat there, projecting a screensaver on the wall while straight out samples played. It was completely dull watching them.

I mean, I could use HSA's "have loads of drugs lined up on the mixing desk (no one need know that they're OTC) and look really scary as you twiddle" method.

The best show involving laptops that I've seen was Jim Black on drums & laptop, Andrew D'Angelo on reeds & laptop, and Hilmar Jensson on guitar & laptop. They each did their own thing, Andrew D'Angelo spent most of his time on his knees playing and making loops, but Jim Black ran the show. He had this awesome controller that he made himself, touch-sensitive pads that he could control with sticks and fingers, and it looked like it went way beyond just stopping and starting loops and pre-made sound files.

It doesn't fix the problem that those of use who are more used to the melody-based improvisation and band energy-feel of most live performance will feel cheated.

That's both parts of the solution that Plaid came up with when I saw them last year on the tour to promote the P-Brane ep.

pita = screengazer

the dead c = bruce russell screengazer

aphex twin = goofy costume and "silly" dance

matmos = first time boring screengazing, later shows developed the goofier conceptual performances (birdcage, unlearning guitar, medical instruments)

jim o'rourke = acoustic guitar for almost the whole set then last song employed live-samples of his guitar for "eureka" which was then stretched into a 15 minute blurry/kevin shields on vallium thing.

wolf eyes = no laptop until last west coast tour, set it up on destruct and screamed/rapped the rest of the show

nobukazu takemura = half screengaze, half hyperdance, but serious

merzbow = screengaze behind the omnipresent shades, minimal movement detected.

sonic youth = jim "rocking" the laptop

that's all i can think of right now.

sherberne's columns on the narod niki show at mutek also ring similar bells. wish I'd seen that.

my comments about 'gesture' miss much of the point about the unique appeal of working with computers; you can set up automated systems that you can sculpt and then respond to, things that surprise you but still have control over. (pioneers being tim perkis, john bischoff, jim horton, but kit clayton 98-00 & the last autechre us tour followed similar lines). The point being: you can't expect gestures from the processor itself, but I can still be dissatisfied with the keyboard/laptop interface itself. You can't not use this incredible software, but using the same keyboard to modify envelope generators that I use to revise my resume makes me uncomfortable.

Mainly I'm being impatient; the next ten years we're undoubtedly going to be seeing a lot of control surface & controller design. It's already underway, but it's difficult for companies to successfully execute; Midiman tried to follow up the Oxygen8 with the Surface One, at NAMM 2002 I could hardly wait to buy two of those, but they ran out of money during R&D and the product never made it to market. They even had to sell Oxygen8 to MAudio. This frequently happens to the most innovative consumer gear; it's been about a year since Repeater was pulled, & now the used price is already well over the original list. I need to stop complaining and learn soldiering.

argh. I meant soldering of course.