exquisitely shitty.

if you did this with a POWER GLOVE it would be REALLY CHIPTUNE!!!!!

i don't really get it but it looks about as creative as LSDJ live mode (I'M NOT SAYING LSDJ MUSIC ISN'T CREATIVE OKKKKKK)
edit: no i watched another video and he was actually playing stuff

p.s. - too lazy to embed.

http://suguru.goto.free.fr/Contents/SuguruGoto-e.html

Gotta love that FM wall of noise though

i also enjoyed this quote.

the thing that gets me excited is that the interface he uses suggests a future in which the music performance is just as important as the music in a way that we haven't seen since the electronic music scene blew up. and while I agree that live loop triggering and playing with the EQ can help the audience build a relationship between the performer and his/her music, I'd argue that it doesn't do enough. people generally don't know the specifics of the parameters we control when we're performing (and this isn't limited to just chipmusicians -- I love me some Nosaj Thing but I'll be damned if I know everything he's doing with that mpd32 up there), and twisting knobs and sliding faders can only go so far. a lot of people don't even know what EQ is! so that gap is still present. this is how you get people like that girl we found a while ago playing music off of her iPod and calling it original material. the skill with the interface doesn't represent a relationship to the music as much as it should (if at all) now that controllers > turntables > instruments.

I just keep coming back to making analogues with classical music performance when I think about this though. no one ever sees a virtuoso violin player or piano player and wonders what parameters of sound he or she is controlling -- all of that is laid out, and the only job we have is to wonder how the fuck anyone gets that good on an instrument. if you give someone like a ballet dancer a system like this but it's super advanced and robust (definitely not featured in this video), you create an experience in which the body becomes the instrument and the audience doesn't have to wonder as much about the parameters the dancer is controlling. or maybe you make that wonder the central part of the performance. or anything! the point being that the skill with the interface (skill at dancing with this crazy controller suit on) actually now represents this relationship to the music that was previously missing.

and one last point: he's making this an open-source project, which is promising. it at least shows that he isn't willing to claim ownership of this style of performance (yet) and is more interested in just pushing the boundaries of what music performance is.

Oh, also, the music was boring/vanilla-as-shit.

I'll agree that the problem of "what-the-fuck-is-he/she-doing-up-there" plagues gameboy musicians. That's where triggering loops live, soloing/muting and playing with the EQ come in - something that allows the audience to build a relationship between what they see happening and what they hear.

This. Also, It may just be me, but one of the reasons i actually like going to hear laptop musicians / dj sets is because i prefer hearing the sound without "seeing" it. I don't want to like the music because it came from an old c64 (though that's always a plus!) i want to like it because it just sounds good.
I'm all about that acousmatic sound, man.

EDIT: wow! I just realized this is kind of EXACTLY what I want from music performance! the reason electronic music is fake-performed so often is because people don't know what the performer's relationship with the music coming from the speakers is...so anything that allows the audience to connect the performer with the music easier is awesome. and this is totally a way to connect the performer and his music, even if the performance only consists of triggering clips and adding effects.

This is actually where I think this guy (and the controllers he's created) fails. If he hadn't had a powerpoint explaining what was going on, I wouldn't have had a single clue what he was doing. That's the one thing that I do actually like about the controller culture and things like monomes (which I don't like for a series of other reasons previously listed by others) - they succeed in the sense that when an artist pushes a button or turns a knob, the audience hears the result. This dude just stood there and wobbled a bit (maybe he gets into it eventually, I couldn't sit through the whole thing.)

Oh, also, the music was boring/vanilla-as-shit.

I'll agree that the problem of "what-the-fuck-is-he/she-doing-up-there" plagues gameboy musicians. That's where triggering loops live, soloing/muting and playing with the EQ come in - something that allows the audience to build a relationship between what they see happening and what they hear.