The equipment became smaller and the distance between performer and audience became smaller too. I remember nights in Berlin clubs at this time, where I spent my time watching guys operating a Roland TR-808 drum computer or muting patterns on a mixer or in their sequencers on their Atari computers. The music was rough, and its structure was simple enough to be decodable as the direct result of actions taken by the performers. Flashing lights on mixer, all fingers on mutes, eye contact with the partner, and here comes the break! Ecstatic moments, created using inexpensive and simple-to-operate equipment, right in amongst the audience. Obscure enough to be fascinating, but at the same time an open book to read for those interested, and in every case very direct and, yes, live!!
This would all be fine, if performance conditions reflected this, but obviously it does not happen in most cases. Instead, we experience performers who are more or less pretending to do something essential or carrying out little manipulations of mostly predefined music. The performer becomes the slave of the machine, disconnected from his/her own work as well as from the audience, which has to do with the second big motor of change: fame. Fame puts the performer on stage, away from the audience. Miniaturisation puts the orchestra inside the laptop. Fame plus miniaturisation works very effectively as a performance killer.
When I started playing electronic music for audiences it was always in a very non-commercial situation, and I enjoyed this a lot. People came because of the music and not because there was a big name on a poster. Being close to the listeners enhanced the feeling of being part of a common idea.
Instead of letting the audience experience the great world of creating electronic music live, and instead of being capable of interacting spontaneously, the artist watches the music passing beneath the time line, and tries to make the best out of it by applying effects.
This situation not only leads the audience to conclude the person on stage might be checking e-mail or flight times, but it is also extremely unsatisfying for the performer. Performing electronic music on a stage without acoustic feedback from the room, completely relying on some monitors, is quite a challenge and most of the time far from fun for the artist. The sound would be so much better if we on stage could hear what the audience hears. The most horrible situation you can find yourself in is the classic rock setup. Two towers of giant speakers, bad floor monitors, and a lonely performer behind a table, obscured by smoke, hiding behind the laptop. Usually, no sound guy in the audience who has any real idea of what you’re going to do or how you want it to sound, and no band colleagues who could provide some means of social interaction; instead, there is just you and your laptop. The best recipe to survive this is to play very loud, with very low complexity and hope for an audience in a chemically-enhanced mode.
Unfortunately, most typical concert situations outside the academic computer music community do not support the idea of playing right in the middle of the audience. In a club, it is often impossible since there is the dance floor and you do not want to be right in there with a laptop on a small table at four in the morning, and even if you do find a situation appropriate for a centered performance, maybe at a festival, after successfully arguing with a sound technician for several hours you might be confronted with the dynamics of the expectations of fans: They want you elevated, they want you on stage, they want to look up to you, they want the show they are used to, and no ‘weird experimental setup.’
There is an interesting difference between the computer music presenter and a live act. While the centered tape operator has perfect conditions for creating the best possible sound, for presenting a finished work in the most brilliant way (which might occasionally even include virtuoso mixing desk science rather than static adjustment to match room acoustics), the live act has to fight with situations which are far from perfect and at the same time is expected to be more lively. Given these conditions, it is no wonder that generally rough and direct live sets are more enjoyable, while the attempt to reproduce complex studio works on a stage seem more likely to fail.
A rough-sounding performance simply seems to match so much more the visual information we get when watching a guy behind a laptop. Even if we have no clue about his/her work, there is a vague idea of how much complexity a single person can handle. The more the actions result in an effect like a screaming lead guitar, the more we feel that it is live. If we experience more detail and perfection, we most likely will suspect we are listening to pre-prepared music. And most of the time we are right with this assumption.
We could come to the conclusion that only simple, rough, and direct performances are real performances; we could forget about complexity and detail and, next time we are invited to perform, we could grab a drum computer, a cheap keyboard, a microphone, and make sure we are really drunk. It might actually work very well. But what is to be done, if this it is not what we want musically?
This article first appeared at Robert Henke’s Monolake site. Many thanks to Robert for generously granting permission for the article to be published at textura. FULL AT: http://www.textura.org/reviews/henke_liveperformance.htm
