Rethinking.

So... all quiet on the Western Front. Partly this is fatigue - the last two gigs contained a boatload of new material and required a lot of work so I've largely spent the last few weeks doing nothing. But also... well, I've been having a bit of a rethink....

One of the downsides with all this electronic music stuff is that, frankly, it's just not very interesting in a live environment. And it seems that in order to make it more appealing to the punters you tend to have to add to the music itself by deploying visuals, "real" instruments, scantily clad folk and so on. In fact, just about anything to stop it looking like there's just people on stage checking their email on their laptops. And all those added things require a lot more work, most of which is entirely unrelated to the music and therefore considerably less fun. (Apart from scantily clad folk, of course. They're almost always fun.)

So far I've been trying to make sure that Looptron has been entertaining to watch and play but, at the end of the day, the more you try to "perform" this type of music the more time you spend looking at the laptop while you're doing it and not actually connecting with the crowd. It's proving to be an instrument that requires your full attention, and that in turn limits your interaction with those you're playing to leading to a bizarre sort of on-stage isolation. Also, largely being synthesised the music doesn't actually gain a great deal sonically from actually being performed (in fact it can be detrimental to the original artistic intent sometimes). I suppose you can rectify this with increasing the amount of pre-baked backing track you use, thus allowing more performance and a perfect sounding gig every time, but as a musician I don't actually think that'd be much fun. This pays so very, very that badly I'm rather determined to have fun while I'm doing it.

The other downside is this - this Looptron malarkey didn't become particularly real until I had to knuckle down and do some work to get ready for the first gig, which involved paring down the set up I use for live performance. Therefore the live thing was good because it made me take that last step and define the project in my own mind, exactly what sounds I wanted/needed and how to deploy them with a minimal amount of fuss. Since then, there's been a conscious effort to keep the rig small, simple and software-based which mean I'm effectively ignoring all the other toys I have laying about and ideas that they inspire. While I really believe working under constraints is a good way of motivating yourself creatively (it forces you to solve problems to overcome those limitations) it means that for over a year everything has been done the same way, using the same kit. I think I need to experiment a bit more for the sake of my own sanity and also deconstrain myself from the need to reproduce this stuff in a live environment.

So, no more gigging for the foreseeable future. And, frankly, a much more haphazard approach to recording and releasing. I've got something in the region of 8 tracks that have been gigged but not recorded or released that I'll try and get sorted and on the website in the near future, maybe in a track-a-month type format. More likely I'll get excited about new ideas, record 'em REALLY quickly and just post 'em when they happen. Any comments or suggestions on this or any other mad plans are welcome.

But first I'm off to finish playing Bioshock.

(PS: meantime, if you're missing the rambly blogging type goodness I've resurrected www.neilsharkey.com for the more random stuff.)

Comments

[Oli_F]

Visuals? Real instruments? Whatever can you mean? That sounds like the strategy of charlatans!! (Still, works for us!)

I agree with the bulk of ye post though. I think creativity does tend to go in cycles, particularly after a big effort towards a a big gig or record release.

You just got to give your batteries a chance to recharge every so often and to check that the things you thought you wanted to do are still the things you do want to do.

And check that you're still having fun. That's quite important too!

Final point: it did always seem quite strange to me that I'd spend hours on crafting sounds and effects for the dance stuff back in the day, and that some 'purists' would expect you to recreate that live when doing a PA. What would be the point?? Play it as it was meant to sound. As long as you have 2000 people dancing and having a wicked time, who really cares about arcane details of sound generation/reproduction?

Faceless Techno Bollocks! Those were the days!