on playing electronic music live

Something I notice a lot of people doing now is turning their sample gathering and miking of sound sources into a kind of performance. Look, I am attaching a small contact mike to this bottle of mineral water and swishing it slowly up and down, and listen to the odd sound that results! Now I am crawling over to this pile of soft toys and producing various squeaking sounds by picking them up and squeezing them one by one!

Laptops
Things they should do to make laptop "performances" more entertaining

I think laptop 'chops' are being developed and some people have them. I'd say you should check MIMEO out, they are a 10 piece group- many of which use laptops- and I'd guess some of them have written articles about laptops and live performance.

All their records (but if I recommend one I'd say get the one on perdition plastics label) are some of the best improv records around. I saw a performance at the serpentine gallery in London last year, one of the gigs of the year.

I don't know why Jason gets booed at IDM shows in North America but not in Europe, but my guess is it has something to do with US Americans sensing that there's a culture war going on, and who's side are you on, loudmouth?

Anyway, to the subject at hand -- watching musicians at work is entertaining, regardless of the technology in use, as are other more show-bizzy types of on-stage acts. What I don't find entertaining -- and even a little insulting as an audient -- is someone pretending to be a musician at work, when no work is actually being done.

There's a different attitude to male expressivity in the US. Look at the reactions to Steve Ballmer and Howard Dean when they did it. Instant ridicule. Real men don't emote.

Is what you want. All you will be restricted by is the number of ins and outs on your soundcard.

My set up, to give an idea of what can be done:

- 6 signals going in to Ableton live (Guitars, Synth, Output from Samplers, Mixrophones, Output from old crusty delay boxes, dictaphones, retro toys)

- These are then processed in ableton live and can be heard alongside any groove in any time signature and tempo or other sounds you've got loaded into ableton live. I usually use a little MIDI pedal on the floor to set the tempo.

- I have one midi controller (phatboy) for controlling levels and panning of different channels and sounds. One controller for triggering samples and sounds and beats n stuff in ableton live. (just a normal little keyboard) just like ross in friends!

- You can also manipulate the sounds you are making in Ableton live as well as the sounds coming from the laptop using the mouse for crazier stuff.

- 6 of these signals run back out through a mixer and my guitar signal goes to my amp, synths go through more distortion boxes and delays and stuff, mixrophones and other sounds and beats are monitored through headphones but also go out of the front of house PA. I also have everything running through an AirFX so I can wave my hands around and look like a prat.

I used to have all this racked up and 'ready to go' but don't bother any more. Much nicer just to plug in a guitar into an amp.

My question was more to do with slipping into a compositional space while on stage, rather than doing a 'performance' per se. Sure, running about and recording samples in real-time is interesting but does it make the music sound any better?

One thing that's good about having live musicians on stage alongside me is that they feed off me. When I drop into an improvisational/compositional mindspace on stage and start composing/improvising live I can feel the musicians picking up on what I'm doing and responding, so I respond back. I haven't the guts to do this solo yet but I'm trying to move away from muting things and changing panning and levels live, into what makes my music interesting: mainly the development of rhythm (in looser senses of the word rhythm). So I should be focussing my energies on developing rhythm live: in other words, composing on the spot.

Ableton Live is good, yes. I like to play with just my existing sample bank though; I'm not that interested in sampling outside things, necessarily.

Ok, right. When Monolake came and played here there was a workshop/presentation on Ableton Live (it being developed by the other half of Monolake). One of the most interesting parts of it was where, in order to demonstrate the live-recording capabilities, he recorded a snippet of his voice than turned it into a rhythmic element in the track he was playing. It was the process of taking a noise in the real world and turning it into a part of the music that was interesting. It's that part that I love about composing/improvising the stuff as well - when I've got a loop going, and I add in an extra layer having no idea what it's going to be like, and then fuck with it until it settles down into the rhythm and you wonder how on earth the rhythm ever held itself up without that part.

That's what I want to see and hear when I go see a laptop musician play - I want to watch them compose on the spot. The music is not going to sound as good, but the performance is going to be interesting. That process of composition (the improvisational space) is very difficult if not impossible to capture when you're composing at home - you spend eight hours working on six minutes, and during that eight hours you get maybe thirty minutes of inspiration/brilliance/interest/improvisation and the remaining seven and a half hours is arranging and the nitty-gritty work of shaping a 'track.'

Just like we expect live bands to sound different (they're operating under an entirely different process f'chrissakes - the need to /perform/ in a studio is relegated to much-reduced role in the final resultant sound/music/recording/noise) to studio recordings of the same band, I think we should expect live electronica to sound and feel different to electronica as heard on the album.

as in, he tweaked it and cut it changed the volume levels and made a part of the /music/. That was interesting. The fact that he spoke into a microphone and then the same noise came out looped from the speakers wasn't interesting, it was when he changed it to fit the rest of the music around it.

Perhaps like the way a guitarist playing will (if they're good) play something by accident or because they're bored or whatever, and, if they play it again, you can hear them recognise what's good about it and shape it to amplify those qualities and minimise qualities that don't help. Check out The Necks for a totally live band who do what I'm talking about, kind of.

(Incidentally, I discovered Herbert about three months after he did one of his earlier record-stuff-live performances here in Wellington - bloody irritating that was. Hopefully he'll come back some day. Or I might have to do that OE I've been putting off for far too long and go seek him out...)

I beg to differ.

I tend to go on massive field-recording exercises where I record like an hour's worth of sound, then transfer it all onto the computer and slice it up into manageable portions (<5 minutes long), and then use like one minute of it and forget about the rest. Hence a dive into my sample banks is often a case of doing exactly that. Tis muchos funos.

Otherwise if the source samples I use are long enough (my setup means I can't run an audio editing app and a sequencer at the same time, so I tend to import large, unprocessed raw audio into Live or what have you) I can usually just slide the point of interest around (in Live, the loop points) and thus have whole new sounds I haven't played with yet. I seriously recommend it, tis muchos funos. Especially if you're playing live (like I was doing on the radio the first time I discovered this) and thus have pressure.

Lynskey - your setup looks nice. Any live recordings?

Tell me about Ableton and how I, as a total newbie, might approach learning/using it. What gear would I need?