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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.

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Richard Zvonar, PhD      
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