There are big EDM artists that have really been pushing the envelop on what you can do in live performance for a while now. Deadmau5 specifically has a real obsession about trying to do everything live and it's obvious that this requires a large amount of musical and technical knowledge and talent.

Here is a video with him talking about his live set set up from 2010 and is a really interesting watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTCqeWu094I

I remember hearing somewhere that he has switch over to a complete live show since then, but I can't find a link to confirm this right now. Needless to say what he does is way more then just play some tracks that he made. Which is one of the reason he despises the term "DJ" to describe what he does.

Edit: He is also incredibly obsessed with the lights at his live show and handles the lighting including the rig himself.

Great topic!

Daedelus (http://daedelusmusic.com/) is one of my favorite artists, not only because of his tunes but because of how much fun he has just rocking on stage with his Monome/various toys, and how it faces it towards the audience to show what he's doing, even if that's a personal positioning preference. He's also in a documentary about circuit bending available on YouTube that's worth watching called Glitch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvlYM5Js450). Your ears won't thank you, but your geek will.

Other artists that are entertaining to watch fiddle with their digital instruments are Side Brain (hacks gaming peripherals to make music), No Sir E and the ever-wonderful Shigeto.

Here's such music you don't need to ignore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA

Wait, this is saying that a genre that was created through instrumachines — people playing a bunch of old roland x0xes, then later the sp-12s/1200s, then later MPCs, live — will somehow be revolutionized by the newer forms of the same instrumachines?

I think essentially the argument is that "laptops are not any fun to play live with" and really, that was just a short phase of electronic music. We all did that for a few years, then found our controllers, monomes, modulars, mpcs, etc. much more fun, and have just returned to what was already there. A laptop can be an instrumachine for the right artist with the right controllers (e.g., Daedelus and his monome http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCzHpQtNduE) attached to it, just as an MPC + SP1200 have been the right instrumachine for hiphop (KRS-One & BDP use one next to the turntables in every concert) for decades.

The concept reminds me of the "synthe-axe drumitar" played by Future Man from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

http://flecktones.com/page/Futuremans-Synthaxe-Drumitar

Two cool things to see on this topic: anything by beardyman (who uses a mic and processors to emulate just about any genre you want) and imogen heap's magical music gloves (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6btFObRRD9k)

I guess I'm getting old, but the demo both looks and sounds like a man virtuoustically playing a pair of typewriters.

More seriously, I think this is cool, but a little overblown in someways, we've technically been able to do this kind of performance (using sliced up digital samples) for a very very long time -- decades. Digital sample machines, of many kinds of forms have been used in live shows for a long time. Think of your favorite 80's new wave band and they probably had live shows with digital synth triggering samples off of a keyboard.

I think this is more of a cultural shift than any kind of technological shift, but interesting nonetheless. The methods of playing these things is much more akin to being a drummer or an old school DJ scratchoff than anything else. But just like complaints about all modern music being overcompressed, these guys have to work off of only two performance vectors: sick beats and cool samples. There's no dynamics in the performance or playing with tonality. Glissando, spicatto, breath control, tonguing, etc. are all right out the window.

Music has been reduced to learning and playback a la guitar hero. A generation of musicians, messing around with samples from music they themselves could never perform.

We talk a lot about technology we no longer have the means to make and knowledge lost in fires and wars and natural decay, and toy with that idea in sci-fi and real life. However, today we certainly have a much greater pantheon of fantastic accomplishments in these areas.

But I wonder if we should consider a similar phenomenon with culture and cultural skills? We may be entering a time were previous cultural knowledge, like how to play piano virtuostically is lost, exchanged with how to play a sampler at similar high levels of skill. We may have lost the means to transmit that culture forward to future generations, but outside of a vague sense of loss, nobody really cares because what we have now is also vast and complex and has its own set of interesting skills that need to transmit forward.

Is this the cultural equivalent of cleaning out the memetic closet to make room for new stuff?

The grandfather of this exploration is Moldover and for the purposes of this discussion ignore his current tendecy to involve an electric guitar in his sets ... a recent development.

http://moldover.com/

http://vimeo.com/moldover/live-at-future-everything-excerpts

He ended up designing and building his own controllers using arcade buttons.

Since this is hacker news I'll point out the whole investigation is largely a technology issue. Many studies have shown that expressiveness of great instrumentalists rests on incredibly small timing variations, which ARE NOT random. Because of latency and more especially jitter in the hardware/software interface true virtuosity is either very hard or impossible to develop using most currently available tools. What the actual acceptable level of machine induced random variations are is a much debated point. This is why I pushed Lippold Haken so hard to increase the sampling rate of the continuum fingerboard to its current sub-millisecond levels. The underlying technology of the madrona soundplane can be implemented at audio rate, which, by definition, should be fast enough to obviate this need.

I'm always mystified when I see people's fingers move that quickly. I can see myself typing on the keyboard, but it's a simple letter that comes out when I press it. It might just be that it's so normal that I don't think it's cool anymore, but people who can mix music like they type is just awesome to me.

Here's two more videos of people mixing/making cool music on the 'fly'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baWlIzwksHs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA

I am not a musician and I don't keep up with production methods too closely, but this method of "load a bunch of loops into your devices, trigger them in interesting manners" sounds almost EXACTLY like what I've read about the way Orbital has been working since somewhere in the early 2000s.

I think the only difference is that the price of these kinds of looping tools has dropped precipitously, so there's more people fooling with them.

(And I am not trying to disrespect the musicianship of people doing this. I'm just questioning it being a NEW THING.)

I've actually had a very similar thought recently. I also feel like it is somewhat easier to master electronic music production (I know that it's still hard but compare how much one knows after playing piano for 6 months with learning Ableton for 6 months). I think that this is awesome since people will be able to concentrate on making interesting music as opposed to learning the instrument.

Also revolutionized (seen that long before) the street music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a1dHCmcJzg

Controllerism has been around for awhile. I discovered it via Moldover -

http://www.youtube.com/user/moldover

Before him, it was called "live pa"

Hey guys, I wrote this thing. And I know there must be disagreements with the arguments here. Bring it on!

Wow. That music is incredibly annoying.

Aww, it's so sweet! Whatever next? DJ's learning to play an instrument?

Totally with you up until the lost culture thing. More people know how to play the piano virtuostically than ever. Culture is expanding and being recorded permanently in the digital world. How are we losing it?

It reminds me of what the blue-man-group does. It's novel, a few people make a lot of money doing it, but it's not the next electric guitar by any stretch.

I think one of the core attributes of EDM is that it is performed by machines. The MPC-live thing seems like an effort to step backwards just to have something to do on stage. I'd rather listen to someone mix a 808/909/303 live. The subtle timing and tuning shifts they make are a thing of beauty (and laptops don't do this). But that's probably just my preference for techno over hip-hop/dubstep coming through.

Anyway, good article regardless.

"Is this the cultural equivalent of cleaning out the memetic closet to make room for new stuff?" To tell you the truth, yes. I make a few rhetorical leaps to get an argument across. I realize Araabmuzik is hardly the first midi controllist ever, he's but a bump in a continuum.

I disagree though with the 2 vectors thing. There's a whole lot of things you can do with tonality with machines. And as for "Glissando, spicatto.." etc, well, I personally think the human voice will be the one instrument that will always be "in".

Point being, I'm most excited to see all the different vectors these machines invent.

And sure, technically we've been able to do this for decades, but it's usually been a hidden process in the studio. It's the crossover to mainstream cultural acceptance and respectibility as a performance instrument. When hardware instrumenalists move tickets, that's what's interesting to me.

"I also feel like it is somewhat easier to master electronic music production (I know that it's still hard but compare how much one knows after playing piano for 6 months with learning Ableton for 6 months). I think that this is awesome since people will be able to concentrate on making interesting music as opposed to learning the instrument."

The thing is that Ableton isn't your instrument, it is just a way to arrange what music you've already created. If you're going software based you would have your synth(s) and then other plugins (VSTs) to modify your sound, each with their own learning curve. Then you would have to learn Ableton or whatever Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) you choose. Plus, since sounds are being created from scratch there is a lot to learn about the theory of sound so that you don't get frequencies overlapping. I know that I thought it would be really easy going into it, but I have found that it is much harder than it seems and I have a new found respect for those releasing their music.

Well that's encouraging. I might need to pick me up an Abelton.

Sure. Its actually going backwards. Back to a focus on the performer as a simple human who does feats, macho virtuosity and does crowd conscious manipulations.

What electronic music opened up is much larger. Music is internal, electric (like our central nervous systems) and cosmic. The focus is in the body and mind of the people experiencing it. Its in the speakers and on the dance floor. The composer disappears, the audience disappears, the technique disappears (and all that thinking about "is the performance technically accurate/innovative ?")

As soon as you put some clown on the stage all the beauty evaporates and people stand around yelling "woot" and generally not dancing. Or if they do it involves fist pumping and making rock faces.

As soon as you put a live musician in the track then you start thinking about technical execution and about what the musician is feeling and thinking. It limits it. I love live musicians (I majored in Saxophone, I have a piano in my room here), but I just want to point out that the revolution of electronic music is that we took music past the limits of performance.

Its pure sound, pure feeling.

Also you should realize that even jungle, juke, IDM, breakcore are often written with furious fingers and lots of live tweaking. And AraabMuzik is using the auto rolls all the time and he has breaks that set the pace. And he has the dynamics turned way down so its actually pretty hard to make a mistake. Turntablists like Q-bert are a thousands times more impressive. Listen to Sabar drumming and forget about the simple boom bap and cheap rolls that AraabMuzik is doing here. Jungle at its peak twisted the mind with intricate rhythms that really blew minds.

And people have been doing crazy live electronic performance for ooooh.... 60 years now. We used keyboards and drum pads and MPC/SP type machines.

Actually, I mostly agree, despite going in thinking I wouldn't. Girl Talk is terribly boring live. There are many better, more creative artists in the EDM world. Araabmuzik as mentioned, RJD2 is a genre bending turntablist/synth junky/live performer, Pretty Lights mashes buttons on a monome and plays live with a drummer, and I think The Hood Internet does much better mash ups and has a better live show than Girl Talk (though they don't do the instrumachine thing so much).

I don't think I fully agree with 'the assumption that electronic music is the future'. It will be part of the future, but analog/traditional instruments will always be around, and will always be a significant portion of what music is created and what music is listened to.

Instrumachines aren't necessarily new, I'd even say the original electronic synthesizers of the 60s and 70s fall into the category. The just evolved into things with keyboards so they kind of got lumped into the 'instrument' category. I was glad you brought up turntablism, another example.

The issue is not that controllerism & live manipulation of machines is a new phase of musical performance, it is that the technology available to electronic musicians has matured to where the advantages of CPUs, GBs of sample storage, live DSP, etc. now have physical controller counterparts. This is nothing new, it is a cycle we have seen repeat through instrument design (actually all production, e.g., printing presses required fixed type, whereas freehand allowed expression) for centuries. With each technological advancement, improvisation and flexibility narrows to meet the constraints of the technology, then expands to meet the needs of those using it. Repeat.

But can you really dance to it? Is it fun to those just listening?

My first impression is that this is just a vain and boring exhibitionism of technical virtuosity, like those fast and boring guitar players (Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, etc) or those endlessly screaming pop divas (Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, etc.) just to show off.

WMF is coming up soon. Have you been in the last couple years or going this time? I haven't been in about 6 years since I moved from Miami to SF. Curious to see how things have changed. When I was at the fringes of the scene back then, the tools that are being used for this style were just starting to come into vogue.

Also, I've seen a few performances where iPads were being used in a similar fashion to decent effect. Not sure which software was used. What are your thoughts on that? The machines these guys are using cool, but essentially still hardware. We are at a point now where an artist can commission a unique instrumachine purely in software that runs on tablets or just regular laptops. This reminds me of classic musicians throughout the ages who either invent their own instruments, or commission artisans to build them.

I'd like to see more examples of people using these tools to control acoustic-seeming sounds. The tech intrigues the geek part of me, but the sounds don't agree with me (I mostly have a piano/classical/jazz background).