The laptop as a performance instrument
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- sloan
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more from Music:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2008/09/15/080915crmu_m...
It's as common to see a MacBook on stage these days as a guitar or keyboard. What does that mean for the concept of a "performance"? And how do laptop-heavy acts -- e.g. Battles, Girl Talk -- actually use them in their live shows? Sasha Frere-Jones explores.-
- groups:
- Music
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- tags:
- Music, Laptops, The Future, New Yorker, 1 more
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BillDupp
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While it is true that laptops as an instrument can completely replace any need for live skill or craft in the artists' performance, you have to have faith that artists would much rather continue to create new mixes with those pre-recordings while playing to a live audience instead of just hitting play and dancing around acting like they are mixing live when they are not. I know there are some DJs who do that, and I personally have mashups and tracks that are great for mixing because they have built in tricks, as well as twenty-minute mixes that I can put on so that I walk away from the booth if I need to, but how boring and shameful it must be to just play something you are not mixing live. I would fear the audience lynching me! Many acts like The Battles, Girl Talk, and even seemingly organic acts like Beck, rely heavily on produced beats and sounds that are impossible to recreate without the computers and machines they used to produce those sounds on their albums in the first place. Acts like The Chemical Brothers or Daft Punk use the isolated sounds from album tracks and mix them live with each other, creating something new and wonderful. I think DJs and artists need to perform knowing that there is at least one person in their audience who knows exactly what they are doing and would be very disappointed if they knew they were just pressing play.
- 1 year ago
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BillDupp
