What Is [Live]? – The New Generation Of Live Techno
Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 6:12 am
http://www.attackmagazine.com/features/ ... ve-techno/
As the latest generation of live techno acts hit the road, we ask what defines ‘live’ electronic music. Is a backlash against lazy Ableton sets responsible for the most exciting live shows in decades? Kristan Caryl investigates.
“The set is never the same.” Skudge performing live.
Live electronic music is nothing new. Back in the late 80s acts like The Orb and 808 State were quick to spot the potential of taking their music-making machines up on stage. In the 90s live electronica became so popular that even the traditionally guitar obsessed Glastonbury invited The Chemical Brothers to headline their main stage. And in the noughties, although the medium had largely switched from hardware to software, hardly could you glance at flyer without that little word being splattered all over it, sandwiched between a pair of brackets to show that this was more than just a standard DJ set: this was live.
In 2013, those four little letters have never seemed more popular. A new generation of techno artists are embracing the old-school all-hardware approach, whether it’s the distorted purist assault of Blawan and Pariah’s Karenn project, the slightly housier techno leanings of Juju & Jordash or the stripped-down grooves of Skudge. Naturally, the proliferation of live sets also makes the definition of live even more ambiguous and sometimes even divisive. After all, a DJ set is technically a form of live performance, whereas many live shows are planned down to the last note. And what about the music itself? Hardware is the choice of all the coolest cats, but does banging a few beats out on a 909 really make for a better sonic experience? Let’s get to the core of the matter: why has the laptop-free live show come back into vogue, just what is ‘live’, and does it really matter?
“Ableton got picked up by the shitty end of electronic music in the noughts. When you think of it, you think of shitty plip-plop techno.”“Shitty plip-plop techno”
Live shows are no longer the preserve of the underground: you’re as likely to find a laptop rocker turning up to the local superclub as you are a rave veteran blasting out his hardware hits from the side of a truck. As such, playing live has become a trend; something to which the young bucks aspire so as to stand out. Ironically, though, so many live sets end up conforming to the pseudo-live norm in which artists turn up, plug in and trigger a load of pre-recorded loops in a carefully programmed sequence, often recreating whole tracks verbatim.
One of the factors driving this trend is the emergence of new tools which allow artists to approach live performance in different ways. The most notable is Ableton Live, the software package which has had the single biggest impact on the way dance music is produced and performed over the last decade. Its clip-based approach makes it easy for samples, loops and pre-sequenced MIDI parts to be triggered on the fly, all in sync with each other. Its impact on the way we view the typical live set is undeniable. Speak to those in the know, though, and they point out that lacklustre ‘live’ sets are not the fault of Ableton itself, but weakness on the part of the person in control.
“Ableton got picked up by the shitty end of electronic music in the noughts,” says Delsin producer and hardware advocate Disco Nihilist. “When you think of it, you think of shitty plip-plop techno, like Minus stuff. It’s easy, it’s cheap. I think Ableton got a bad name from the people who used it early on, yet Legowelt was talking in a recent interview about the difference between using an MPC and Ableton: in a lot of ways Ableton can be more live than an MPC because you have more freedom and control in your set. It’s romantic to see hardware and say, ‘Oh, this is more live than a laptop’, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.”
Exercise One’s live setup
Berlin-based duo and long-time live performers Exercise One are in a fine position to comment on the similarities and differences of both approaches. They started out performing with “a huge PC tower, two big screens, a bass and a Korg PolySix” before switching to Ableton for almost a decade and then moving on again. ”We decided to come back to a very simple but powerful set up,” Marco Freivogel explains.
“Live shows in a club context became more and more of the same attitude, with everyone using the same methods. Technology can also breed some laziness and for me things get boring when everything is easily possible. So we had the feeling we needed to change and get back where we came from: being able to play like a band, truly live, where everyone has his instruments and you need to practice and rehearse regularly. Today we arrive at the club with a Moog Minitaur, Roland SH-101, Dave Smith Mopho, Elektron Analog Four, an MFB Tanzbär, an Elektron Octatrack, a Korg MX as sequencer for the Moog and Mopho, a couple of effects and some compressors. I have to say it is the most enjoyable set up.”
“Half way to fucking Milli Vanilli territory”
The enjoyability factor is what drives the truly unpredictable live twosome of Juju & Jordash. When the Dekmantel and Golf Channel associates first started playing live they were mixing up pre-recorded patterns and loops with minimal live improvisations.
“It’s not about making a point; we just want to enjoy our profession.”“We only enjoyed the fully improvised bits,” remembers one half of the Amsterdam-based pair, Jordan Czamanski. “We felt that we were cheating, like, ‘What the fuck are we doing? We may as well play records’. Then the show got to 50% live, but when we met David [Moufang, aka Move D] and got booked together as Magic Mountain High live, the geographical restrictions between us meant we couldn’t meet or rehearse before the show so we had to go fully improvised. It’s not about making a point; we just want to enjoy our profession. Noodling over some playback or muting stuff on the desk was just boring and I just didn’t see the point of it.”
In turn Juju & Jordash thought “fuck it – it seems stupid to bring anything pre-programmed” and as anyone who saw them play for Boiler Room at Dekmantel festival this year will attest, they are now about as high up the sliding scale of ‘liveness’ as is possible. One plays the keys, synths and bass, the other drums and occasionally guitars.
“One of the reasons why it was important to go live was that we didn’t see any live shows that we liked,” continues Jordan. “It all seemed like an act – everyone was trying to appear spontaneous when everyone knows it’s half way to fucking Milli Vanilli territory. The whole idea of our show is that we don’t prepare anything; we just have to make sure we have the right gear for the gig. It’s nice if we have a proper sound check but as we learned this summer with festivals it’s not always possible so we just do a headphone sound check. We prepare the first beat, first ten seconds and that’s it.”
Juju & Jordash live at Paradiso, Amsterdam
“You can’t break rules until you know what they are”
“Being an entertainer is something you just have to develop. Whether it’s a given gift or learned, it’ll have to be earned.”In the case of Juju & Jordash it helps that one half, Gal Aner, is from a jazz background, and is used to playing sessions with other musicians, often in a wholly free-jam fashion that resonates in their current electronic setup. But is it necessary to be formally trained in order to play live? Over to Detroit siblings Lenny and Lawrence Burden of enduring techno outfit Octave One, who got their first taste of live music when working extensively as roadies. ”Formal training has probably played a great deal in our live shows, although we can’t really put a finger on where or how. Knowing when things instinctively need to occur during the show so things don’t go on too long, but long enough so that you appreciate them, and to know where it needs to happen, is key. I don’t know if you have to be able to play an instrument or read music to do a decent live show, but any knowledge that you are able to acquire can’t hurt, you know!”
They continue with an important point: “All the music lessons and theory – or lack thereof – won’t make you a good entertainer. That’s something you just have to develop. Whether it’s a given gift or learned, it’ll have to be earned.” Swedish techno titans Skudge put it in equally frank fashion: “Being a trained musician doesn’t make you relevant. We have plenty of technical knowledge, for sure, but we spend so much time confronting ourselves with the most diverse music we can, and that’s even more crucial to what we do.” Or in the succinct terms of Canadian Wagon Repair boss Mathew Jonson: “If you want to be inspired and evolve musically then why not study? You can’t break rules until you know what they are.”
“This is not rock and roll”
DJing and live performance have grown together since techno’s infancy, but how do the two disciplines relate to each other? A Guy Called Gerald is happy to confess that he’s not a DJ. DJs, he reckons, “could tell you more about football than their art” – he describes his own life, in contrast, as “100% electronic music and dance”. When it comes to the qualities needed to make a good live electronic musician, Gerald has a rather different perspective.
“You need to check out black dance history from the late 60s to the late 80s. Learn about our culture; ask questions.”“I think you need a feel for the music, especially if you just jumped on the scene in the last 15 years,” he laughs. “You need to check out black dance history from the late 60s to the late 80s. Learn about our culture; ask questions – you won’t look stupid. Check Jamaican sound systems out, learn about how we danced and about our communities; it’s a million miles away from now but it’s important to find the connections. This is not rock and roll.”
Indeed, this is not rock and roll, but more pertinently, neither is it DJing. Though the best DJs respond to the moment, the crowd, the club, the context, there is still a certain formality and clearly defined limit to what’s possible with just two (or even three or four) decks. Gerald embraces the unpredictability: “When I started playing live over 25 years ago there was no memory and my machines were linked together with home-made wires, so stuff would happen outside of the groove. I would find ways of bringing it back in, and now it’s just in my DNA. Sometimes I throw a spanner in to fizz it up a bit.”
A Guy Called Gerald live at Fabric
Skudge are a little more open to the art of DJing. “We also like DJing,” says Elias Landberg. “Quite a lot actually, but it’s a completely different thing to playing live. If you listen to our RA mix, you’ll see we think about the mix in a whole different way, yet with similar aesthetic tropes to a live set. When we DJ, we don’t know the tracklist beforehand: with the live show, we have way more focus on what to ‘do’ with the material, because it’s only about that. We have to think, ‘How are we gonna present our music to the audience tonight?’, which is a lot different to when you DJ.”
“Honestly, we like them both,” say Octave One when pressed as to where their loyalties lie. “But playing live just gives us so many more options of things to do spontaneously. We have literally 24 individual tracks plus four effects buses to play with compared to just a couple of songs we can work at a time. It’s almost endless the things that we can do compared to just DJing.”
“Always hit and miss”
Mathew Jonson, who uses Roland 303s, 101s, MFB’s 808-inspired 522 drum machine and a Machinedrum in his live shows, is effusive about the joys of making music in front of people’s very eyes.
“Live shows are always hit and miss, and that is the whole point of it… it’s exciting!”“Live shows are always hit and miss, and that is the whole point of it… it’s exciting! You can feel the energy between musicians or if it’s a solo act you can really hear the energy from the artist if they’re making things up as they go along. It takes a lot of energy, though, so it’s always good to play a few things that are more prepared in addition to all the improvising. The balance between training and daily practice, pre-show preparation, and knowing the equipment you have with you, allows the artist to have the freedom and confidence they need to improvise once they hit the stage.”
There’s seemingly no consensus on where best to find that balance. Some degree of advance preparation may help ensure a smoother, more coherent set, but part of the joy of playing live for those that do is that things can wrong. It’s the genesis of the improvisational aspect that really sets true live show apart from those planned to death at home or in the studio.
Jonson’s Cobblestone Jazz jumped into the ‘fully live’ deep end years before many of their contemporaries. “It probably has something to do with a lot of the other acts not having the balls or the talent to take risks in front of people,” he explains. Citing peers such as Nicolas Jaar’s band, dOP and Minilogue as “great examples of live acts going much further than just mixing tracks off Ableton”.
“All it takes is a few drum machines and synths”
Fetishisation of equipment is rife in electronic music, but Mathew Jonson is pragmatic in terms of his own choices for live performance: “All it takes really is a few drum machines and synths, a sampler or even a good MIDI controller integrated properly into the software to have the tools to be more involved and experiment a bit. In the end, it’s about utilising the best parts of the technology we have available to us. Computers are great for sequencing, sampling, multi-tracking and editing, for example, while synthesisers and drum machines are great for making new sounds.”
“In the end, it’s about utilising the best parts of the technology we have available to us.”Generally a keen proponent of hardware over the years, Jonson has lots to say on the subject of digital versus analogue and thinks the gap between the two is ever decreasing. “Up until about the last year or so affordable digital technology has not been advanced enough to compete with analogue equipment so this is why I have worked this way in the studio and on stage. The sound quality is one thing but also the interface and response of the equipment is important.
“Computer latency always turned me away from working with plugin synths and MIDI controllers because they’re always milliseconds behind and that affects the groove in a negative way. With outboard equipment it’s still much more stable and responsive but I imagine that in the next years there won’t be much difference any more.”
“It’s more about what you’re saying”
But for all the questions of equipment, improvisation and ethos, there’s one crucial factor which can’t be forgotten: the music. There’s very little point playing a fully improvised set with banks of exotic hardware if the end result doesn’t come up to scratch. There are also obvious limits as to what any live techno act can play. For one, each will have their own stylistic preference, will have been booked to play as such and will have an expectant crowd who will have at least some vague expectations of what they came to hear. To go totally against those will likely never get you booked again, but neither will recreating the same set every time. Is there a solution?
[“I would rather see something interesting in Ableton than another boring and mediocre version of Larry Heard with a 707 on stage.”“The set is never the same,” claim Skudge. “Firstly because of the live programming, but also because new songs get added to the set constantly and because we like to use different gear as often as possible. It all depends on our mood. We do play our songs, so if you don’t like Skudge, we can’t do too much about it. But more seriously, we can always extend a jam when we feel we hit some magic, and when the audience gives us cheers it always enhances that moment of performance. Specific sounds also have more impact on the crowd – such as the 909 kick drum – so that’s always data to take in account.”
Live shows, however good, bad, staid or freewheeling are unlikely to go away any time soon. Perhaps the point is that just because technology allows you to go on stage and make music without mixing records, it doesn’t mean that you should. As Disco Nihilist puts it, “right now it’s cool to be raw and hardware and have a table full of boxes and people think that’s more authentically live. To me it’s more about what you’re saying. I would rather see something interesting in Ableton than another boring and mediocre version of Larry Heard with a 707 on stage.”
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