An interesting bit of trivia comes from the divulgence that Modeselektor was the result of a veritable German alt-tronica DIY endurance match, where the last men standing in a collective of audio and visual producers teamed up to form the current lineup.

More on Liz’s blog.

At the recent Live Performers Meeting in Rome, each of the 4 days of began with a VJ Talk hosted by AVIT. LPM is designed as a space that enables VJs to engage with each other face-to-face, and the vjtalks were intended the catalyst for this. The talks started on the theme for the day (Digital Freedoms, 8Bit + Electropop, Breakbeat + Techno + Electro, and Visual Genders) and led into topics surrounding VJ practice and to the participant’s own practice. The variety of views and personal insight that came up made for some really engaging conversations, however by their nature they existed in the moment only. To try and capture some of the spirit of the talks, short interviews were filmed afterwards, and can be found on the AVIT site’s vjtalks page: http://avit.info/vjtalks.

As one of the organisers, I think this is a rich area to explore, but am unsure how best to document it. If you do watch the videos, drop a comment back here with any feedback or suggestions.

Jaromil interviewed by *spark

What features a DJ, lights, hundreds of stomping fee but is totally quiet? Why, Bonnaroo’s Silent Disco, of course!

For the seventh straight year Bonnaroo descended on Manchester, Tennessee for a long weekend of music, art and comedy, and it’s a spectacle to be sure. The annual festival featured four days of acts running from 12-15 June 2008 in Coffee County, TN. More than a music festival, Bonnaroo also featured the comedy (with sets by comedians Chris Rock, Louis C.K. and Janeane Garofalo), lots of art installations and a movie theater that played such titles as Know Your Mushrooms, The Doorman, the Live Earth Film Series and the NBA Finals.

Anyway, back to the Silent Disco. It works like this, when you arrive you’re issued a pair of Koss JR170 wireless headphones which allow you to hear the sweet, sweet sounds of the DJ. The concept is that you can jam out into the wee hours without keeping the people – who are camping about 300 yards away – awake all night. The concept is kind of novel but it’s a good one.

When I got some time to visit the DJ was spinning an upbeat, hip hop, 80s, old school set and it was fun to dance around and check out everyone’s headphones. At first I found myself hypnotized by the glowing LEDs on the headphones, but after getting comfortable they just faded into the background. In fact it doesn’t take long until you forget that you’re wearing headphones at all. When you take them off things get weird.

A particularly funny memory is taking my headphones off during Billie Jean and not hearing any music but instead hearing everyone sing out the chorus (totally off key):

Billie jean is not my lover
She’s just a girl who claims that I am the one!

Good times, good times.

I posted seven pictures from Silent Disco 2008 and a 86 more from Bonnaroo 2008 in my Flickr Photostream. I also recommend that you check out some of funny videos from the Silent Disco to get a better feel.

Peter Dines: Could you tell us about Modul8 for a second?

Lillevan: I don’t want to force anything on you, it’s just that before you think I’m just doing Jitter things…

PD: So Modul8: how does it differ, what’s it like?

L: It differs because it’s not programmable at all. It’s a standalone application. It’s not a programming language like Jitter. It’s very easy to use, but it’s actually very good when it comes to frame rates; you can blend many layers into each other and you don’t get slow frame rates. It’s very very good because on stage I don’t like software where I’m thinking too much about software. I like to perform an idea or a texture or an aesthetic or an emotion. And I don’t want to be stuck thinking ok, where does that signal go in my patch and things, and Modul8 is just fantastic for that.

PD: How do you control it live?

L: I have a MIDI controller. You can save various setups and you can change them very fast, you can change them on the fly.

PD: And this is mostly for video, or can you also blend vector images and still images?

L: It takes just about any format that quicktime reads. Lots of flash, anything.

PD: Can you create geometric figures in it?

L: Oh sure, yeah. You can create anything – it reacts on sound, which I don’t actually use, but if you’re a VJ in a club it’s perfect for that as well.

PD: Were you using this last night at the Rechenzentrum show?

L: Actually no, I wasn’t. That was Jitter on one laptop and on the other one it was Final Cut. In Final Cut I just have about 60 timelines, and I can just try things – I can do in and out points, I can play that, and then I can use the Jitter for actually reacting in my own way, realtime, to the music.

PD: I’d like to ask you guys about the economics of creating and performing experimental electronic music. Where do you see the revenue sources coming from in the future, and what do you think makes up the largest chunk now?

Fennesz: It’s a difficult, difficult question. Obviously, I think, we have to play live more than before. I mean, I play live enough, and I don’t want to play more than that, but it’s important to do that, and… on the other hand, I think small labels like Touch, for example, when they’re functioning well, when they’re experienced enough and they’re not having too many people employed – they’re doing OK, actually. They’re doing really fine, because they are flexible enough to do anything from DVD to download to vinyl, whatever. So even if the whole industry is going down I think Touch have been performing really well in the last three or four years.

PD: I’ve seen Touch music for sale on sites like Boomkat in lossless FLAC and high bitrate MP3, without DRM. Are you okay with seeing your work in that format?

F: Actually yes, I’m OK with that. I do that myself, you know, I don’t buy CDs and I don’t buy vinyl. I get the mp3s from iTunes because for me it’s extremely important to have the thing as fast as possible. I want to have it right now and I don’t want to wait until someone is sending me a CD or whatever that I have to pick up from the post office because I’m out of town when they deliver, none of that. So… for me, first of all, it’s the musical information I want to have. Then if I really love it a lot, then I could still buy the vinyl. Or the CD or DVD or whatever.

PD: So you have a record player and buy favorite releases on vinyl?

F: I think you have to have everything; you have to have every platform available. For example, a few months ago a friend of mine has been inviting me for dinner. He’s like 55 years old and his son is twenty. And [the son] is a big big fan of mine and he really wanted to be introduced and talk to me and it was great with him – he’s a musician too – and he said he and his friends, they only buy vinyl and mp3. No more CDs. They’re not interested. CDs are not cool. Vinyl is cool. And mp3s. I found this quite interesting.

image credit: Hryckowian

PD: Yes, vinyl is making a big resurgence at some music shops in Montreal as well – mostly specialty genres like black and death metal are very big on vinyl –

F: Yes, oh yeah.

PD: While we’re discussing genres, what’s an artist or style you like that no one would predict – death metal, klezmer – I don’t know, what?

F: I like a lot of different things, really, but maybe people wouldn’t expect that I’ve been a huge A-Ha fan…?

PD: A-ha! Me too, actually. Love that stuff. [to Lillevan] Do you want to chime in on the economics of digital downloads?

Lillevan: Well, being a video artist, digital downloads aren’t very high on the list of priorities because bandwidth is still a problem, but I certainly see it going that direction, and I think also that labels – as Christian was saying – labels that love what they do, don’t just want fast success but take care, are very precious about their things, that they will sustain themselves. I think also there will be new forms of releasing things. Like now I see bands are releasing a book with the CD because that just makes it more interesting for fans to have the book, and they buy the CD. If they didn’t have that they’d just download the CD illegally.

PD: Added value.

L: Yeah, exactly. It’s just added value. If you really take care and make a nice product. It’s been the same with Rechenzentrum. We make nice covers and put in an extra CD with the DVD so people have it for their car radio… things that people like to own. I like to own a nice product as well, but I don’t like to own a CD that after three months the bits of plastic are breaking off at the edges. And then it’s scratched and I can’t play it anyway. And the cover’s this size on glossy paper. I don’t like to own that, I don’t like to pay 25 euros for it but something that’s really nice, whether vinyl or CD with a nice packaging, nice design…

PD: That’s true. When I’m trying to decide whether or not to buy a CD, I think of the cheapness of the packaging, how it will break. It’s a catch 22 because you want to support the artist, but you feel like you’re stabbing yourself in the back paying so much money for it.

L: Yeah, sure, there’s little bits in the middle, they break off and every time you open the CD falls on the floor. It’s not a great design feature. But I think these added value things, books, DVDs – I mean that’s obviously my specialty being a video artist – but DVDs in collaboration with things, also subscriber things are working very well. I think maybe you know about Einstuerzende Neubauten and their scheme, you know them? Well they’ve created a system which is very interesting, a subscriber system so people subscribe to the band, pay 35 dollars a year. And for that you can watch the band on the Internet recording their album. You can log in anytime during the night time when they are recording, you can watch them, listen to their fights, you can make suggestions. One member of the band is on every night, a different member, just to answer questions where people can say “why did you change that bass line, bla bla bla”.

PD: So it’s like micro-patronage. Everyone can be a tiny Medici supporting their favorite artists.

L: Exactly. And that’s worked fantastically for them. They’re earning money for the first time in twenty years. Before they were on Mute and they were recording and they’d have to go on tour to pay Mute back for money that they didn’t recoup. Now for the first time it’s working and they give shows that are just for those people, just for supporters and they come from all over the world to Berlin or to Austria and these people travel all over the world to see them. And it’s really attracting their fans and keeping them. It’s working very well for them. Also a very nice idea is when they play live – on the whole American tour they were doing it – they record the show and they go backstage immediately and burn CDs of this particular live show. And they give it to the supporters, free, with a photograph of the band standing outside that venue in the morning they arrived – and signed by each member of the band. People really love this. This is like a really special event, this CD is super special. And they only pay 35 dollars per year for all of this added value. And I think they’ve got a few hundred thousand supporters now, which is great.

PD: That adds up! After a while you’re talking real money.

L: And I think it’s great because you see the music industry, so many people complaining, ahhh you know it’s, it’s all falling apart, and instead of complaining you come up with a new idea. And they’ve been rewarded for this idea. They’ve won prizes at media festivals in Europe for not complaining but coming up with a new business model. That’s great.

PD: Have you thought about doing some of the same things, burning DVDs of a performance after a show?

L: To tell you the truth, after a performance I do quite like to go to the bar and talk to people [laughter] instead of going backstage, getting my DVD studio and starting to encode mpeg 2 but the idea is very nice.

PD: Well you have to have people do that for you.

L: No but actually what I would, to your suggestion, I wouldn’t mind for example putting the performances on the Internet next week for people to download or something, that’d be fine.

PD: Like a paid iTunes download?

L: One day when I have time I might get around to it. I think it’s a good idea.

Resident sonic maestro Peter Dines spent some quality time with Christian Fennesz and his video artist Lillevan at Mutek, and got so much geeky information on Christian’s techniques that we split it into two stories.

Fennesz shared some of his favorite patches from the modular patching environment Reaktor for our kore.noisepages.com site:
Mutek Interview: Exploring the Reaktor User Library with Fennesz

… and talks more about live performance, composition and sound, and collaboration for CDMusic:
Interview: Geeking Out with Fennesz on Sound and Performance

Barem, aka Mauricio Barembuem took the stage at the slightly foggy, humid SAT in Montreal on Friday and laid down thick, groovy, harmonic minimal tracks to an appreciative audience. Since 2003 he’s been DJing and performing live both in his home country Argentina and abroad and in 2005 met Richie Hawtin who encouraged him to submit a demo to Minus and his career promptly took off.

Here’s a few video clips of his performance, with the last one showing both what the crowd was like and the extent of the visual display at the SAT.

Barem At Experience 2 on Friday May 30 at Mutek pt 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Barem At Experience 2 on Friday May 30 at Mutek pt 3 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

I had a super, super time talking to Christian Fennesz on Friday, and as a bonus Lillevan from Rechenzentrum was there and talked about his upcoming performance with Fennesz, video software etc.

Though he uses Max-based “lloopp” onstage, Fennesz is a user of Reaktor (and anything / everything else) in the studio and says he browses the user library for new stuff once a month. We namechecked a couple of the great Reaktor builders who make stuff he uses – Martin Brinkmann and Dieter Zobel, among others.

Later I had a great interview with Tim Hecker about software, sampling, source material, composition – he also uses Reaktor – I’m going to email him some followup questions to get more specifics. Tim had a run in with a door earlier that day that left an egg sized bruise swelling up on his cheekbone. As a result I don’t think we were connecting as well as we could have. The poor guy was trying to eat a late lunch and recuperate while a lineup of media people waited to interview him. I think he’s okay – his performance later that night was terrific. Tim performed in near-blackout conditions with nothing to distract from the massive blimps of sound he inflates and releases – that’s his analogy for what he does. More on that when I get the interview transcribed.

Ben Frost kicked off the A/Visions 3 show with processed guitar, stacks of amps, feedback and a command of the stage – the guy knows how to present his music in a visually arresting way. Two old-school cassette recorders sat miked at each end of his performance rig, matched by two stacks of amps and speakers off in back and two the sides. Ben attacks his material physically, working the rig with his whole body. Expect to hear a whole lot more from Ben.

Leo de Boisgisson promotes festivals in Bejing, China and spoke to the importance of community involvement, specifically, in her case, relying on locals and ex-pats living in China.

Mat Schultz from Krakow, Poland has organized events in Eastern Europe, and brought up the role of political economies in shaping festivals. For instance, the government of Belarus wants to have international art festivals not only for the cultural benefit to the local community, but for the cultural capital it brings to their country. Since they want to appear integrated with the rest of Europe, international festivals give them an opportunity to present a public face to the rest of the world.

Olof Van der Winden organizes the Today’s Art festival in The Hague, Netherlands, and agreed with Mat Schultz’s perspective, even going further to say that festivals of this nature serve as “a marketing tool for cities.” He said that since The Hague is focused on being a political capital it’s a “cultural vacuum,” and could use the help that festivals would bring to increase tourism and assist it in making its image more conducive to the arts.

Dan Seligman brought up the need to involve emerging artists and up-and-coming promoters as a way of insuring the sustainability of the community. For instance, younger and newer members bring additional energy and have a fresh perspective that more established promoters may not have.

Kate Lesta of Communikey from Boulder, CO USA brought up the issue of environmental sustainability in organizing festivals. The rising cost of jet fuel it directly affects artist booking and programming since performers and participants fly into a central location from all over the world. Since the festival by its nature consumes a large amount of jet fuel, she suggested utilizing carbon offsets, or relying on the creativity of participants to work on alternative solutions. From a funding perspective, there are funds available to support the “green lifestyle,” and if festival organizers were to take sustainability into account they would have more resources available as well as helping to minimize their impact on the environment.

Relja Bobic runs the Dis.Patch festival in Belgrade and sought to engage a specific niche of the electronic music community by featuring only live PA artists, since traditional DJ culture was already well established in Serbia and the surrounding cultures .

A few themes recurred throughout the discussion. For one, the idea of marginal culture and isolation in some form, and the way in which communities and resources were able to be mobilized on a local and international level to develop a supportive and engaged audience. Along those same lines, interdisciplinary collaboration is also important, as well as creative thinking on the parts of the promoters, programmers, and artists involved in order to overcome obstacles, such as rising fuel costs. An awareness of larger political agendas and economic motivations is also increasingly required for organizers who desire to make their festival a success. Despite the increasingly global nature of locally-based festivals, organizers have to consider the specific contexts in which their festivals operate, whether they are subject to the demands of a niche audience, to the requirements of a sponsor or grant endowment agency, or to the local economy. Even with the challenges facing independent producers all over the world, supportive institutions like Mutek allow them to come together for a productive dialogue and energizes the global community of electronic music.

Up next, Cristian Vogel and his Capybara!

Sorry, Cristian, we’re geeks here and the gear gets top billing!

Cristian’s set was fantastic. He’s a master at creating grooves that turn themselves inside out and upside down by dropping the beat and reintroducing it, those sorts of tricks.

Sleeparchive blew minds and shook bodies using a minimal setup. From his releases I had expected racks of analog hardware… there’s a richness to the white noise and static in some of his music that sounds vintage. I’m not 100% sure but I think one of his techniques might be running audio from an empty channel on his mixer back into the laptop and amplifying it until the hiss is audible, then gating and processing.

The second A/Visions featured, among others, headliners Rechenzentrum and Thrill Jockey artist Németh.

You may know Stefan Németh from his work with Radian. At Mutek, he was joined by drummer Steven Hess of Pan American for a live performance of music from Németh’s first solo release, Film. Ironically, there was no visual presentation other than the musicians themselves. Németh performed with a modular synth that was maddeningly turned away from me so I can’t say what it was… he also looked to be triggering things with an MPC. I love seeing electronic musicians performing live with drummers or acoustic instrumentalists – when it’s well coordinated, it’s magic. This was no “here’s a click track, stick to it” sort of deal. One got the feeling that the performers were keeping a keen eye on each other and balancing the tempo on a knife edge. Great stuff.

Rechenzentrum presented the North American debut of their work, Silence. It was visually and sonically lush. The next day I got a chance to talk to video manipulator Lillevan who was also presenting his work in conjunction with the music of Fennesz at A/Visions 3 on Friday. Lillevan is a user of Cycling 74’s Jitter, and his constantly mutating visuals were a brilliant counterpoint to Marc Weiser’s audio half of Rechenzentrum. The audio spanned everything from the sound of steam engines to what I can only describe as dub by way of Esquivel.

Too much music, too little time! I’ll have something to say about performers Freida Abtan and Nokami + Sans Soleil later.

This is turning out to be an awesome edition of Mutek.