Instrumachines and the Evolution of Electronic Music Performance

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.

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.)

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?

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.

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).