i hate everything about this, down to the faux hawk and reason preset loops
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San Diego, CA
kineticturtle wrote:
I'm getting really tired of the controller culture of electronic music. Everyone seems to think if they come up with a niftier device to make the same music, that they'll reinvent culture somehow.
well the thing is -- they WILL reinvent culture. just not for us!
imagine coming into electronic music in 5 years. the turntable is all but dead and CDJs are on the way out, and controllers are the way to go. I would argue that a kid growing up and wanting to be an electronic musician will be thinking in a completely different paradigm than a kid growing up and wanting to be an electronic musician 10 years ago.
the thing with interfaces (and midi controllers are totally interfaces) is that each one changes the way we interact with the system that the interface lets us interact with. people on turntables interacted with music completely differently than people using midi controllers do. the thing with changing this interaction is that it also changes the way we THINK about these interactions, so again, kids growing up today are going to be thinking about this stuff differently than kids growing up 10 years ago. and because of stuff like this beatjazz thing, kids growing up 5 years from now will be thinking of music and music performance totally differently.
(chipmusic is totally an example of this)
I think this is exciting! it's looking toward a future in which the performance of music is very intimately connected to the human body in a way that we haven't been able to explore in a really long time because we're still getting over this whole computer-as-discrete-object thing. it'd almost be as intimate as a guitar player or a violin player or a flute player exploring the contours of their physical being and how that physicality affects their music, except now we have a bunch of computers as the source of sound rather than a vibrating surface. I'm kind of a sucker for stuff like this that makes electronic music performance into more than just some dude behind a laptop/turntables!
and it looks dumb right now but that's because we're still in the process of this exploration! eventually we'll get to a point where the control of parameters is 1-on-1 with the movement of the body and it's not just some dude moving his arm for a filter effect or stomping his leg to trigger a clip 
(also hi matt!)
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. it could range from a huge series of button presses and highly technical and fine movements (as in turntablism) down to the single press of a button + fist pumping (as in me )! 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. what makes this exciting is when you think about what happens when you get a better dancer with a more robust system. when you get ballet dancers controlling really specific parameters with very finely tuned movements then that's when I say the future of music performance is here.
Last edited by spacetownsavior (Jun 21, 2011 9:34 pm)
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Brooklon
spacetownsavior wrote:
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.
Last edited by Note! (Jun 22, 2011 9:10 pm)
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Godzilladelph
Note! wrote:
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.
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San Diego, CA
I should reiterate -- I'm not saying that anything that this particular dude was doing is amazing; rather, I'm just excited for the kind of future music performance he represents. I totally agree with you on both points: the controllers aren't robust enough for the audience to do anything but wonder what the hell is going on when he moves his arm, and the music itself wasn't great.
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.
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▐▐▌▌▐▌▌█▐ ▐▐▌▌▐▌▌█▐ ▐▐▌▌▐▌▌█▐
i dig the pcb tattoo he has on his arm.
spacetownsavior wrote:
and it looks dumb right now but that's because we're still in the process of this exploration!
i also enjoyed this quote.
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New York City
I've seen the performance of Suguru Goto 3 years ago in the Mapping Festival, he basically has been investigating in this kind of interfacing for years and my main problem with it was exactly that I couldn't tie, at many times, the body movements to the sound. In Suguru Goto's case, he makes contemporary dancers perform, covered in his custom built controller suits. It also did not help that the audio was actually more like a wall of noise. Some parts worked better than others, but in general I had this issue of thinking that he could have been triggering the noise himself from his computer in coordination with the dancers instead of the dancers actually triggering the sound with their movements. The show was pretty awesome tough and the suits have this Ghost in the Shell-esque vibe to them which makes them cool.
http://suguru.goto.free.fr/Contents/SuguruGoto-e.html
Gotta love that FM wall of noise though 
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Amsterdam
At least he is experimenting with new ways of improvising and live expression, something definitely missing in chiptune.
Last edited by DS-10 Dominator (Jul 1, 2011 8:55 pm)
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liverpool - uk
This has reminded me of a guy I saw at glade festival a few weeks ago, He was dressed as a spaceman and all his instruments were made by himself, the main one being some kind of lever on his chest that controlled the pitch of a synth. I spent ages stood watching him.
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Darkness
I like this dood http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPcoM7BIDZ4
p.s. - too lazy to embed.
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uhajdafdfdfa
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
Last edited by ant1 (Jul 2, 2011 4:16 am)
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Amsterdam
ant1 wrote:
if you did this with a POWER GLOVE it would be REALLY CHIPTUNE!!!!!
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Wherever
I'd rather stand there with my Gameboy making people believe that I'm playing 'Pokemanz', than wiggle around like that. If that's the future, then fuck the future.