Live on my mind (again...)

A couple of weeks ago I was performing in The Hague, The Netherlands at the end of a very eclectic night of a festival called "Berlin Ruft An" In the middle of my set, a woman brought me a handwritten note asking me if I could please play something by Chicks on Speed. In a spiky angry rush, I was struck by the piss-tasting irony of being asked to play a song by a group that doesn't produce their own music (and historically at least, mimed performances with instrument-shaped cardboard boxes) while I'm in the middle of a live set. So, letting my cranky side take over, I crumpled up the note and threw it after the girl as she walked offstage.

~~~Ahh the satisfaction of petty revenge.

I'm a bit embarrassed now about my behavior. But this story has become a teaching moment for me. How can the audience judge the difference between a live show or a Final Scratch DJ set when the gear is basically the same? Maybe making cardboard synthesizers would actually add to the pizzazz of the setup.

I used to be Mr. anti-laptop-live show, and in 2002 I made some nice snarky t-shirts with a line drawn across a bald performer leaning over a laptop. "It looks like he's checking his email!" we used to say. But then I sold out, and started using the very same computers I once railed against. I had my reasons: all of my live gear was in various states of disrepair, held together with duct tape and krazy-glue. My E-Mu sampler had been discontinued. I'd already been busted once carrying this conspicuous musical cargo crossing the border into non-Schengen territories, and I got off easier than some of my friends who were jailed for the night awaiting the next flight in the morning.

There were also good technical reasons to switch. When I prepared a live set with hardware, I used to sit in front of my Propellerheads Recycle transferring the 500 samples to the E-Mu over the SCSI bus, one at a time. Then I had to re-sequence the samples with new MIDI tracks, and then dump all the sequences into 64 track .MID files to load into my MPC-2000, map controllers, and then troubleshoot the whole arrangement. As much as I loved playing with the MPC, the sequence of the show was basically hardwired, because I couldn't page around between songs without getting lost in the MPC's sequence screens.

Though I was loathe to admit it at the time, Ableton Live is better. I can drag the same 500 samples onto an empty Arrange window all at once, and then spend 3 or 4 days mapping controllers and setting up a sensible hierarchy with some basic clip automation. Comparatively luxury. When I'm in the middle of a show I have greater flexibility to move the songs around in time and across the mixer channels. So, there's also a better capacity for improvisation. It still doesn't look too interesting to the audience though. In fact, I think there's a paradox that the more flexibility you give yourself to improvise, the less you can interact with the audience, because you always have to look at what you're doing on the screen. This paradox works in the opposite way as well because the more pre-programmed your live show is, the easier it is to make sweet eyes at the audience members, or practice your hands-in-the-air superstar-DJ-charisma tricks.

I guess with that paradox in mind, every performer of  a live show must decide if they're trying to work the crowd, or work the music, or perhaps to compromise by allowing different modes into different parts of the set.