On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Kevin Kennedy <the...@gmail.com> wrote: > At the end of > the day (or night), does it really matter? If it moves you then it > moves you. If not, what is the point? >
I think that the distinction between 'Live' and 'Not Live' is blurred at this point to where it's meaningless. I've had the privilege of watching the two performers who have put the most effort into their 'live' performances up close: Shawn Rudiman and Stewart Walker. They both have put a huge effort into making their performance mean something more than pressing 'play.' And they both build their sets out of preprogrammed patterns. Shawn works his drum machines in write mode, but any time I've seen him play he has an MMT8 full of patterns to drive his synths. Stewart will even occasionally drop a complete track into his set, but only if it's one of his tracks that's so old he doesn't have separate parts for it. For both guys, they're making dozens of decisions every minute about how to shape their music, and their goal is to engage their audience. What makes their performances 'live' isn't how much of the music they're playing in real time, it's how they make the music interactive with the audience, and it's whether or not their music is engaging and enjoyable. If people want to be pure about live performances, they need to give up techno and go back to watching live bands. I enjoy both, myself, but I've been bored to tears at shows where every note was played by a musician with their hands. When it comes right down to it, playing a song on a guitar is every bit as much a pre-programmed experience as playing loops on a computer. What makes it good or bad is in the realm of intangibles. Does the performer react to and shape the energy of the room? Does the performer project charisma? My father is a Symphony Conductor, and the same questions pertain. A bad conductor is, in essence, pressing 'play' and the orchestra just goes off and does their thing. Having played myself in orchestras for crappy conductors, I know for a fact that they're little more than human metronomes or worse -- they're unreliable human metronomes, and the orchestra has to ignore them and listen to each other or everything goes wrong. A great conductor has established rapport with his orchestra, and knows how to coax or bully a meaningful performance out of them, sometimes with little more than eye contact and a tiny gesture. So that's what it comes down to -- does it signify? Does it affect you emotionally? Is it pleasurable? There's no absolute measure of the methods behind the performance that determines whether it's good or not. It's fashionable in some circles to look down on laptops, no matter who is using them. I think that's a load of crap.