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Re: Using pre-recorded material in performance
Title: Re: Using pre-recorded material in
performance
At 4:31 PM -0700 8/7/04, Travis Hartnett wrote:
I'm curious as to how many people are
using some form of pre-recorded material
In recent years all of my solo performances have used
pre-recorded material, but none of this material was created by me
personally. My practices is closer to DJ practice, with the important
difference that I have neither an interest in, nor an obligation to
provide, beat-oriented dance music. Neither do I have a well-defined
structural plan for these performances. I generally select a batch of
CDs (as few as two and as many as 20) and I practice a bit during the
days prior to the performance.
My performance processing is based in part on looping but is
probably just as much a case of "sonic mayhem" where the
source recordings are transformed to often extreme degrees. The extent
to which this is true as variable as is the size of the pool of source
recordings. For instance, at Loopstock 2002 I used a wide assortment
of CDs, from Xenakis to the Simpsons sound track to the Who. The
processing was often extreme and the rate of change from one sonic
moment to the next was fairly quick. My performance was also rather
kinetic, since I was changing CDs and fiddling with the processor
controls pretty quickly. In contrast, my performance at
Woodstockhausen that same year was based on only two CDs (a Bach cello
suite played on viola by my partner Pam and a Conlon Nancarrow player
piano disc). The processing was primarily loop-based and the control
was performed mainly with a MIDI fader box. As a result my performance
was much less physical and the music was much more "evolutionary"
than "disjunct."
Performing solo with recorded sources is something I do out of
necessity. I'm not much of an instrumentalist and I don't feel I have
anything much to offer as yet another "looping guitarist."
On the other hand, I've been processing other performers live since
the late 1970s and I've done a lot of electroacoustic duo
improvisations. This is my preferred performance mode, but of course
it requires the presence of a suitable partner. Lacking one in recent
years, I've adopted the CD-based approach.
There are interesting differences between performing with a live
musician and a set of recordings. With a live player there is a
certain degree of "performance ESP" that helps fuse your
separate actions and reactions into a single performance gesture. In
addition to this is the obvious fact that the instrumental or vocal
performer is reacting to the processing. On the other side, with
prerecorded material there is often an element of serendipity that
comes from not hearing the source material until after it has been
captured (at least this is a common situation the way I have my system
set up). This puts me continuously into the situation of having to
deal in the moment with whatever has been thrown my way.
what the audience response has
been.
Mostly it's pretty good. It's usually pretty clear what I'm
doing, so there's no confusion about whether I played live something
or used a recording (it's all recordings). Audience response seems to
depend pretty much on how well I play.
--
______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://RZCybernetics.com
