by GMM on May 13th 2012, at 21:07 CET
Last week, played live with Ugress in a cinema. Some observations.
- Playing live in a cinema is a splendid idea. It has potential but also challenges. I would most certainly like to continue develop this idea.
- It is kind of weird - for everyone involved - to perform in front of a quiet but attentive audience.
But this is awesome - for everyone involved - regarding concentration, experience, detail and sound quality. I'm not stressed by this, just observing. It's a transition and will probably take some trial and error to find a balance between spectating and participating.
- Concentrated on integrating guitarist Thomas T. Dahl further into the live show. We spent some time pre-producing (sketching), working out new tracks together, and I did new edits of old tracks to make room for him to improvise.
Thomas is a very talented instrumentalist, with his own unique expression. As is Nasra, my drummer. I could be "hey! play this and that or ELSE!", but I prefer them to bring their own voices into the live shows. They are - or we all are - very different personalities and musicians and I like the mix of us. Nasra already works exceptionally well, we have grown together over multiple performances.
So I decided this time to do a show only Thomas and me, to give him my full focus both during pre-prod and during performance. Very worth it. In particular the darker tracks.
- The screen. Ha ha! The screen. Oh dear. And the sound system and the subs. Utterly bloody delicious. Why don't music venues spend this effort on their setups? Playing in clubs is often a nightmare for live sound and image.
- Speaking of which. The support, assistance and effort put into the show by venue Cinemateket USF was incredible. Also the follow-up with discussion and evaluation afterwards. Awesome people. Very glad to know I will be working more with them this autumn on an upcoming project.
- Tried a lot of new tracks, I don't think we've ever played this many new or changed tracks ever in one set. Most of them worked well. In particular when I'm able to work them in sequence in the set, together with visuals. Might not work so well standalone yet. But really happy to try them out live.
- The regular "hits" didn't work so well. Interesting! Maybe that's just me, because I'm so used to the spontaneous energy of recognition-response in a club. Perhaps the cinema invites to focus on the darker, more complex tracks. I notice from video footage - at some time Thomas and me get lost in concentration on some glitch-polyrhythm impro, sliding back and forth of taking the lead, while a wordless film-noir dialogue tries (and quite expectantly fails) to say something above us. We're very introverted, concentrated. The images enhance the mood. Which isn't "party". In the cinema format that works perhaps better, than the regular extroverted stage flirt moments of Manhattan and Spiderman. Which of course isn't BAD. Just different. Bigger palette.
- Spent some minutes this winter on upgrading visuals, to run in full HD at 1:4. That works so nice on a well-oiled and enthusiastic 4k projector. 1:4 is probably the widest widescreen format invented. Also, been battling a visual idea I had for some time. I finally nailed how to do it just a few days before, an endless control-room screen zoomer. Still needs some adjustment, especially in selecting which films and scenes to grab from, but zooming through screens of dozens of live sci-fi control rooms - all in sync with referincing music - looked kind of mesmerizing on the huge screen. It's like meta raised to meta raised infinity.
- I'm now developing tracks as kind of a "package", not sure what term to use. But music, sound, live parts, visuals and musicians are now developed together and presented live as a complete "experience". I know, that sounds pretentious, I'm sorry, not sure how to label the process really.
Everything is now a parallel effort, all developed at once or at least towards the same release. (Which takes a lot of time, which is why I'm more quiet than usual. I'm just concentrating.) Previously it was kind of serial, or layered. First make a track, then maybe a live version a year later, maybe some graphics if it's a release, then live visuals some years later, then musicians when they appear. Now, all of this at once.
Of course I'm not doing this for all tracks. And I think it's not a universal solution. As a listener of music, sometimes it is awesome - and correct - to simply grab an mp3 off the web, legally or not, play it on laptop speakers on an improvised late-night kitchen party and find a connection and emotion in a lo-fi recording. Other times, it's nice to sit in a darkened theater and be taken on a surround HD expedition in 4k to other dimensions. There is room for both.
- Tried an extended usage of Nintendo Wii-motes as controllers. I like that they are wireless and give me physical freedom. I can move over to Thomas and stay close to him when we battle. But the latency for axis movement isn't awesome. Or I'm too quick. Heh.
Also talked to people afterwards who was like "what on earth are you doing with this and that". For the kids show we're good at communicating and demonstrating what each "thing" does. Maybe I should find some way to communicate this in the cinema show too.
- There was no backstage or wardrobe. So we had to improvise, the cinema is located in a huge complex and eventually we found a wardrobe on another floor. Afterwards I learned it was the wardrobe for young girls taking ballett classes. I am so relieved nobody from security came in and found me there, waiting nervously in a corner in a white lab coat.
- Tried using the Teenage Engineering OP-1 as a simplistic and immediate live sound source. I (sometimes) love the gritty, lo-fi sound of the device, and I filled it up with even grittier and dirtier Amiga Protracker samples. Then playing them live, and processing the sound further through the AirFXes and regular Ableton sfx, controlled by the Wii-motes. That worked kind of neat. I love the tactility of the device.
- Tried using two projectors on each side for side-projecting onto us performers, with programmed and scripted lighting. Hahaha, FAILED. That Did Not Work At All. Or, it sort of worked in theory, if you knew when and what to look for, but compared to the 4K projector, the side projectors where hardly noticeable. Maybe they just gave some subtle flair towards the end, when they were running full. I'll put this idea in the maybe-consider-again-sometime-later shelf together with the pixel-rays.
- Marketing. Something something marketing. Don't want to talk about it. La la la la la.
- Did a kids show in the same cinema the next morning which was sort of completely different, but I'm not reporting on that right now, as I'm currently smack in the middle of developing some stuff both for the Ugress Kids version for next year and working on some NRK kids TV stuff also for next year and going analytical on it now will kill the flow but I did manage to hit myself with the microphone and start bleeding, and I'm not developing THAT further.
- Got a lot of feedback from different angles post-show. Both confirmation on aspects I already knew but also eye openers to things I wasn't aware of, especially from the cinema oriented crowd.
Summarized. The cinema format for performing live music with talented instrumentalists and many pixels of visuals is absolutely brilliant. It's not perfect, but that's the cool part. Developing and evolving for this format is awesome.
Conclusion: Success.
