FL Studio, beloved to its users by its original name “Fruity Loops,” has long had a Playlist mode that could be used to assemble simple live performances by jumping to sections of your music.

But a new alpha mode takes this mode far further. It’s still based on the Playlist, but can add clips dynamically – including Audio, Automation, and Pattern. While still in early testing, developer Image-Line has released some information about how triggering works, as well as the video above. And oddly enough, just like the video we saw earlier this week in Renoise, it employs a Novation Launchpad controller. (The impact of the monome on the market is really hard to overstate.)

More details from the developers:

Controllers

Keyboards – There are 12 Clips assignable to each Playlist Track (one octave of a MIDI controller per track)

Launchpad & Mouse – Unlimited Clips assignable to each Playlist track.

Other Pad based Controllers – Limited only by the number of MIDI note assignable pads

At the moment there is basic scripting to define extra pages on the launchpad, you’re able to define actions for buttons, among transport ones, notes & controls.

The CPU load is similar to the project as it would play normally.

Performance Mode [Image Line forums]

It’s not quite an Ableton killer – not yet, anyway, especially as it lacks Ableton’s unique Session View paradigm for working in this way. It’s even a bit short of some of the hacks we’ve seen for Renoise. On the other hand, if you’re an FL fan you should be able to make your performance plenty sophisticated – and since just trigger clips isn’t everything, you might also want to play along with an instrument or sing. And I could see this catching on. It’d be great to see something other than Ableton in live laptop performances. Variety is the spice of life.

Rating: very, very promising.

Previously (this week, no less): More Renoise Step Sequence Goodness: Launchpad + Lauflicht (Other Controllers, Too)

Thanks to Dario Lupo for the tip!

Image-Line are quick to attach lots of disclaimers about when the work will be ready, but a teaser video demonstrates they have builds of their FL Studio Mobile software running on Android devices. It looks like a particularly good match for tablets, and is the latest indication that their may finally be a horse race in tablets for music. (Insert more disclaimers here.)

The phrase “low latency” is likely to make prick up some ears. No computer is “zero latency”; digital systems introduce some delay from recording to playback. The quality of the user experience, therefore, is having things happen without too much latency, whether it’s when sounds from a microphone or line input are processed or when a touch event or MIDI input results in a sound. iOS at least puts that latency in the acceptable range. Android devices, meanwhile, have earned complaints. Some of these issues appear to have to do with the way the platform itself works, in scheduling and the hardware abstraction layer, whereas other challenges arise from the variety (and, let’s face it, inconsistent quality) of Android’s various devices.

However, there are signs that developers might make this situation more manageable. We hear there are changes in Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich release that could impact both the way native access to the audio system and scheduling work; it’s too soon to evaluate those changes, because the OS isn’t done yet. But that leads to the other important development: Android developers are beginning to test performance across devices for some harder numbers. Those kinds of tests could benefit from easy software distribution and the (relatively) open source nature of the operating system — or at least, to be fair, from freely distributing genuinely free-software apps for testing. It’s also worth saying that not all applications require low latency, or, indeed, concern themselves with input-to-output latency. (Not all apps use an audio input.)

It’s not yet clear what Image-Line’s own “low latency” engine is about, but it’ll be interesting to watch. First promised in June, at least, it seems Image-Line is making some headway. More details:
http://www.image-line.com/documents/android.html

I’m still far, far from being able to recommend purchasing an Android device for use with music – iOS wins handily. But developers naturally want to look ahead, beyond the present situation to what might be possible in the near future, especially since they’re the ones making the apps. And there, the picture is worth examination.

Didier Dambrin, FL Studio’s original creator, has a new synth entitled Harmor that looks like one to watch. There’s a beautiful crop of new synthesizers this season that could have you yearning for a winter spent with long nights somewhere deep in the Northern Hemisphere, producing new music – see also, to name just one, Cakewalk’s Z3TA+ 2. (Both Harmor and Z3TA+ 2 are Windows-only, so time to boot up the PC or, Mac users, update that Boot Camp partition.) VSTi and native FL Studio support; US$149 but on sale this month for $99.

For some reason, releasing any synth right now involves demonstrating that the kids can make their wobble bass and dubstep with it, but I trust synthesists out there to do other things, too.

Introducing Harmor

Okay, I kind of buried the lead, but I wanted to give the synth its due.

Don’t want to boot into Boot Camp to run FL Studio?

This beta might interest you:
FL Studio for Mac Beta-Testers Wanted [Image Line forum]

Yes, you see that right: it’s FL Studio, aka Fruity Loops, running on the Mac platform. Synthtopia wonders if Hell froze over, but not so fast. Image-Line said they’d never build a Mac version of FL Studio. And they haven’t. The magic here is possible through Codeweavers Crossover, a commercial proprietary technology built on the open source tool WINE. Codeweavers already offers a standalone product that lets you run a variety of Windows (and Linux) software on the Mac, based on the same tech that lets you run Windows software on Linux. Here, Image-Line reports that there’s some additional customization and testing and tweaking that lets this run without further intervention on your part. (WINE can work beautifully, but there are various compatibility wrinkles with specific software – Image-Line and Crossovers have evidently worked specifically on making FL Studio function properly.)

WINE, the underlying technology, is an emulator but not in the sense of a virtual machine, which is how most Windows compatibility tools are implemented. It’s actually a re-implementation of Windows APIs. See WINE myths for more. That means that, once fully tested, FL Studio can run as well on the Mac as on Windows. What you won’t get is Mac-native APIs, meaning the resulting software won’t behave terribly like a typical Mac program. But FL Studio, like much music software, tends to behave in its own way, anyway, so I don’t actually believe that’s a huge deal. Updated: I realize I should say that compatibility issues or unpredictable behavior can be a big deal; I’ll be interested to see if the Mac experience can replicate the Windows experience or you’ll want to still reboot.

If you want to give this a try – and help ensure the quality of the release – beta testers are wanted. See the forum link above.

It’s easy to forget that some of the simple joys of electronic music are foreign to many lay people. Odds are, if you read this site, you’re an intelligent and well-informed digital musician. (I don’t mean to stroke my own ego, either; because so many of you are intelligent and well-informed digital musicians, you send a whole lot of the information my way that makes this site even possible.) But for all the extensive discussion, a lot of what digital musicians seek to do in their performance is simple: they want to make their work expressive and performative, and convey some part of that gesture to audiences to include them in the action.

And so it is that a video of a live mashup is impressing general audiences as much as it is enthusiasts. It’s not a complex work, but it’s brilliantly performed, and in incorporating some 39 songs into one epic mash-up of Ableton-synced clips, it presents plenty of touchstones for audience members. The ingredients: FL Studio, Ableton Live, a Novation Launchpad, and a Novation ReMOTE Zero SL MKII.

It also helps being really good, as this person is: the “mash-up” is never awkward or overwhelming, and rather than boring bar-long sync, is played live with 16th-note clips. It isn’t so out of the ordinary compared to other virtuosic MPC videos, but that’s the joy of the Web: the best players do actually get their stuff in front of lots of eyeballs.

What’s also interesting is that, because it incorporates pop songs and you can see visually what he’s doing (in a design first seen on the software for the open-source monome platform), general audiences are picking it up. A few examples:
“Pop Culture” mega-mash-up: 39 songs in three minutes [Bailey Johnson for CBS News]

The video viral “video chart” at The Guardian, UK’s daily paper

College Humor’s Biggest Thing

No less than Kylie Minogue tweeted about it. Thanks to Novation’s Chris Mayes-Wright for keeping track of this video’s meteoric rise in the past four days. Artist Relations once meant mainly keeping celebs happy; now, it includes catering to YouTube stars, which I think is a nice development!

That popularity may encourage some trolling and jealousy, but I have to say, I’ve seen just as many hard-core Ableton and monome users and whatnot also drool over this video. (Thanks to everyone who sent this in – a lot of you sure did and I’m only now getting around to it! Blame constrained time and poor Internets here on the road in England.)

If you aren’t necessarily into pop samples, though, I think this shows that even some simple performance elements can appeal. Sure, we love far-out interfaces and big visual impact around these parts, but you can also simply turn off that bar-long quantization or whip out your instrument of choice – keys, strings, voice, pads, or whatever it is – and actually play. Most people really get and appreciate that, and it’s fun for the player, to boot.

And on that profound bombshell, I wish you a very happy weekend indeed.

FL Studio Mobile, previously announced for iOS, is now available for iPhone, iPod touch, and, in an “HD” edition, on iPad 1 and 2. The biggest feature: if you’re an FL Studio user, you can take your projects and load them on the mobile version for on-the-go editing. That makes FL the first major, non-Apple studio app to do round-trip workflows between mobile and desktop.

The release is also causing some mainstream outlets to notice, like BetaNews, who suggest this breaks a 13-year, Windows-only FL Studio run. That’s not entirely fair: Image-Line have released cross-platform software. The issue is that the full-blown FL Studio desktop version is deeply tied to Windows. FL Studio Mobile is a ground-up app. But it’s still big news.

BetaNews notes that the round-trip isn’t as easy as you might like:

Like Garageband for iPad, pulling files off of the iPad is kind of a chore. In order to load FL Studio Mobile projects into FL Studio for Windows, users need version 10.0.5 or later of FL Studio, and files must be dragged and dropped from the FL Studio Browser (or Windows folder) to the desktop one by one. There’s not yet an easy export feature for fast file sharing.

That could change, though, if the application adds iCloud support – and even this, as described, sounds easy enough to me.

Other features:

• Piano keys, drum pads with flexible layouts – so you can arrange, say, multiple stacks of keys or drums the way you like.
  Instruments, kits, and loops included.
• 99-track sequencer, piano roll and step sequence editing.
• Import/export not only FL Studio projects, but WAV and MIDI files, too. Unfortunately, sample loading isn’t available yet, but is coming.

An Android version is also in the works:

What about Android OS? It’s on the roadmap, stop nagging! We have a development team working on a low-latency Android audio-engine and there are many screen resolutions and device specifications to consider, it’s not as simple as you may think

FL Studio for Mac is still in the “forget about it and stop asking” category, so no change there:

Does this mean FL Studio on Mac OSX soon? FL Studio Mobile is not a port of the Windows version of FL Studio. It is the product of a completely separate development team, and code, so FL Studio Mobile, while compatible with FL Studio has no impact on FL Studio development and vice versa.

Just expect to read about this everywhere, thanks to a viral contest Image-Line is running. Guys, take it easy: I think people would blog your FL Studio Mobile without having an iPad to win.
FL Studio Mobile News

On Create Digital Motion today, I write about the 1.5 release of ArKaos GrandVJ, the latest version of the popular Mac and Windows VJ tool. The big innovation: insert a VST plug-in into software like Ableton Live, and you can pipe MIDI and audio to your live visuals for easy synchronization and collaboration. You can even, as the video demonstrates, run an Ethernet cable between two machines. (This works on both Mac and Windows, despite the appearance of only Apple laptops in the video.)

GrandVJ is doubly interesting for readers on the music site, as it’s long featured a music-centric interface (a black-and-white piano keyboard was a feature of the earliest versions of ArKaos), alongside easy MIDI assignment. (APC20 support was recently added alongside out-of-the-box, bi-directional control with Akai’s APC40.) GrandVJ also boasts terrific, media server-quality performance at the price of a VJ app.

Stay tuned for more tests, and a round-up of live visual tools. (Or, if you like, volunteer to help us out or make requests on the kind of information you’d like to see.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as what we’re covering in the live visual scene, so if you aren’t already reading Create Digital Motion with your Create Digital Music feed, come check it out / follow both sites on Twitter and Facebook. And believe me; I’m not just being self-promotional here — a lot of us want to see more live visuals when we go out to shows! Vive le revolution audiovisual.

ArKaos GrandVJ 1.5 Packs in Features; Talks to Music Apps via Plug-in

Apple users may not know the name – FL Studio, formerly Fruity Loops, is a favorite on Windows – but FL is a favorite music making tool of the bedroom computer producer everyman. (Everywoman?) So, its imminent appearance on the iPad tablet is eagerly anticipated, even in the aftermath of GarageBand. Developers Image-Line, an independent software house from Belgium, delivered the first hands-on video today.

It’s worth pointing to the work of stretta, to compare the sorts of things people imagined the iPad would do before it did anything. Formerly of MOTU, and best known as the creator of wonderful patches for the monome grid, he imagined the product demo below before the iPad had even shipped:

The software is a functional prototype running in MaxMSP which I recorded with a screen capture program. I composited this onto a foam core cutout of a picture of an iPad with After Effects. The finger touches are a complex choreographed dance that I had to memorize and perform in one take.

See his blog post today. The video is striking. Of course, I still wonder – what’s the next big idea?

Update – since I seem to be potentially misinterpreted here – yes. These are all ideas seen elsewhere, seen regularly on the Lemur. I’m not making any claim on the novelty of stretta’s original mockup – actually, I’m more amused by how hard it was to try to fake an iPad without one in hand! If there is a lesson here, I’d say it’s ship your ideas, and consider what sorts of ideas other people won’t ship.

FL Studio, aka Fruity Loops, has always been like opening a toybox of sound goodies for sound nerds – up to 30 instruments and 40+ effects in the latest edition. Just about every tool offers deep control for serious sound programmers, but there’s also a sense that those tools can be fun and immediate. And oddly, while developer Image-Line does introduce some instruments and effects as add-ons, all the functionality in the core program is covered by their lifetime free updates program. This isn’t feature bloat intended to entice you to upgrade; it’s more like what happens when you let the oompa-loompas run Willy Wonka and make whatever they want.

Or just forget all of that and think “FL Studio, the music app that makes you glad you’re running Windows.” (Don’t worry: fullscreen mode means you can actually even hide the fact that Windows is there at all.)

FL Studio 10 adds countless improvements to editing, from shortcuts to editing tools to display zoom, and gets smarter about working with 64-bit plug-ins and memory, as well as introducing new tools for manipulating audio pitch, time, harmony, and rhythm.

Among many new features in this version:

• More 64-bit: Automatic 64-bit plug-in support
• Smarter Memory Management, Audio Settings. Even on 32-bit Windows, you can get up to 2 GB of memory for plug-ins, with up to 192 GB for 64-bit Windows, and separate memory allocation for samples. There are also tweaks to ASIO audio performance.
• Better Mixer: Improved mixer views (with wide strips, at last), metering, and automatic delay compensation.
• Notation-ready, Smarter Piano Roll. It’s easier to edit with the piano roll view, thanks to new zoom, shortcuts, stretch handles (finally), display sync, and a “magic lasso.” It’s not just editing that’s better, though: you can also export directly to a PDF score by choosing Export.
• Better Playlist: The Playlist feature now has loop, pause, and skip options for more dynamic live backing tracks, plus new shortcuts for editing and previewing.
• File autosave and backup.
• A new Patcher that lets you save instrument and effect chains as single presets, visually. (Not SynthEdit – it’s a new way of patching together instruments and effects.)
• Optional add-ons for Celemony Melodyne-like pitch and time manipulation (Newtone) and pitch-correction, manipulation, and harmonization (Pitcher).

The addition of Pitcher is interesting, I think, because rival Propellerhead added their own take on this to Record in the form of Neptune.

If there were any comparison to make to FL Studio these days, Propellerhead’s software would be an obvious choice. But the two tools remain differentiated. Unlike Propellerhead’s dual Record/Reason offering, FL Studio is an all-in-one package, and it works as a plug-in and not just via ReWire. Record has more conventional mixing and arrangement tools than FL Studio, and the open signal patching interface in Reason and Record is unlike anything else available. And… actually, this list is so long as to not really fit in this article. But what I like about both is that you get a self-contained, unusual box of tools. Each has more of the sense of walking into a fully-stocked studio with some personality to it rather than a generic tool. (The generic approach has advantages, too, but the sense is different.)

FL’s capabilities remain:

• Flexibility: use it as a VST plug-in or connect via ReWire.
• Host anything: VST 32-bit and 64-bit, DX, and FL-native plugs.
• Multi-track audio and MIDI, with unique, tracker-like and step sequencer interfaces in addition to traditional piano roll and audio views.
• Unique built-in tools for manipulating audio, slicing and beat detection, warping, and now increasingly pitch and harmonization. (Yes, other tools do this, too, but FL has some unusual instruments and effects integrated with the workflow.)

FL Studio itself is really beyond comparison, a bundle of some of the best editing and instrument and effect tools out there. And that’s before you get to the stunningly-affordable pricing, which runs US$49 – $299 for download editions (up to $399 boxed, but I recommend the download version), all with free lifetime upgrades.

There’s just not a more affordable package in the long run, taking into account the breadth of the software and the endless upgrades.

You know where to go:
FL Studio 10

FL users, as always, I’d love to hear both what you think about the new release and how you use FL’s tools (new or old) in your work.

Update: yes, you can win things linking to FL, as Synthtopia notes. I’m not in love with this sort of marketing gimmick – I’m happy to write about FL purely based on its merits, personally – but it’ll certainly be awesome for you to win the prize, and if I for some reason do (which would be amusing), I’ll put the cash toward doing some free FL tutorials on CDM.

Full rules, if you want to enter:
$1010 competition

Of course, if you also link to CDM, I might just buy you a beer or two next time I see you. Odds of winning: 1 in 1. Beat that.

Image-Line has long promised it’d never make a version of its popular FL Studio – aka Fruity Loops – for Mac desktops. Blame the Windows-centered development tools in which this cult-hit all-in-one production studio is built. But it has found its way to a fruit-themed platform of a different sort, with FL Studio Mobile for iPhone, iPad, and iPod.

Leaked specs and early screenshots have surfaced (apparently unintentionally). That means anything said here could change as the app is developed. (Thanks to readers who tipped us off, though it seems I-L didn’t intend to make this public!)

The app looks cool, but it’s largely FL Studio in name only. You get something like 90 preset instruments (only the attack envelopes are editable), a step sequencer, and pad triggers. There’s also very nice MIDI support, both for Core MIDI and the MIDI Mobilizer, meaning this will work with various MIDI accessories both for the iPhone specifically and more generally with MIDI input. Image-Line also claims they’ve balanced battery life with low latency.

All in all, it looks like a decent on-the-go sketchpad for quick ideas, but hardly a big departure from other apps we’ve seen on mobile. In fact, while it promises the ability to open your projects back in FL on the desktop, you don’t even need to be an FL user – MIDI file export is available, too.

I see some FL Studio users, loyal to a non-Apple desktop OS, are already unhappy that this isn’t on Android. But my real disappointment here is that I don’t see anything beyond the superficial look of the step sequencer that makes this look like FL to me. I would’ve liked some of the quirky personality of the original on handheld. It’s a useful-looking tool, but put that name on there, and some people may come away feeling like they’ve got artificial fruit – only 5% real juice.

I like things like this – you never know when an idea will pop into your head that you want to get down. (And the app, now via updated screenshots, looks really nice and clean and touch-friendly.) But it does serve as a reminder that the $500 spent on a tablet could also go to a pretty amazing laptop that’s more than capable of all the depth and power of the real FL Studio.

Official specs on the app from I-L The specs we got from Image-Line’s public site are apparently “placeholder” specs, so not entirely complete or accurate. From comments: “To clarify, that spec page was actually just a placeholder with the specs of Xewton Music Studio. FL Studio Mobile, which is being created by the same developer, will have different sample content, amongst other changes.” But they look as though they’re at least in the ballpark, so here they are:

Save projects and load in FL Studio personal computer edition.
Photorealistic dynamically configurable 85-key keyboard
Instant positioning via the slide gesture and resize with the pinch gesture
90 studio-recorded instruments (16bit 44.1kHz sampled from real instruments)
40 free instruments, 50 available in the in-app shop
4 categories: classic, band, electronic, world
Release and attack time configurable per instrument
Sustain samples • Pitch bend via accelerometer
Low-latency, highly optimized, high-polyphony, battery saving audio engine
100 beats (drum loops)
5 real-time effects with lots of parameters
3 high-quality reverb algorithms, delay, 3-band equalizer, amplifier, filter
128-track sequencer • Beat & metronome settings (tempo, signature)
Per-track mute, solo, effect bus, pan and volume adjustment
Edit whole tracks or bars, down to individual notes:
Draw, quantize, transpose, repeat, move, length, velocity, etc.
MIDI import and export
Save and load your songs and export to wave
Wi-Fi and iTunes file transfer with your Mac/PC
Songs and MIDI files can be opened directly from Safari and Mail
Unlimited undo and redo
Detailed in-app help
Play or record 2 different instruments at the same time with 2 keyboard rows
Key labels (Cs only, all keys, all keys colored)
iPhone 4 Retina Display supported
Compatible with: Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer, Akai SynthStation 25, CoreMIDI

http://www.image-line.com/documents/flstudiomobile.html

The patter of rain against the window brings in day two at Decibel.  Early afternoon coffee is the ‘tall’ to order for the conference sessions in Pravda studios.  Robert Henke (Monolake) greets with a smile as he takes the podium for the first lecture “The Age of Abundance.”  It is a rare opportunity inside one of the minds behind Ableton, as he thinks on the future of electronic music eleven years after the founding of the company.  His talk revolves around the evolution of computer technology to the present of full realization of the infinite sonic possibilities.  The pit fall he sees in this is the difficulty it can create in making decisions.  Using his own Monodeck as an example he explains how the ability to do anything is limited by a hardware device, yet at the same time, limitations offer a simplicity, which allows for musical decisions.   Henke will have two performances during the festival to put his philosophies into practice.

The conference continues with a workshop from Windows DJ Dave Pezzner “From the Studio to the Stage”.  It serves as a continuation of the thought from Lusine’s workshop, this time focusing on adapting songs from a different DAW for use in Ableton Live for performance.  Pezzner uses his own workflow from FL Studio to exemplify.  Next Drumcell (Moe Espinoza) leads a session on Native Instruments Traktor Scratch Pro.  He uses the Kontrol X1 and Maschine to show ways of taking the DJ platform further by exploiting a multitude of functionalities through controller integrations for his live set.

To this point, a clear line can be drawn between the various workshops, tying them directly into Henke’s lecture.  Each have presented their own set of possibilities toward pushing electronic music into the world of live performance, which according to Henke is the new frontier for digital music.  With a variety of platform choices, each with near infinite levels of control, finding the right balance of control and limitations to make the musical decisions required on stage proves to be the challenge.  This is the hidden undercurrent of the festival, each artist bringing to the stage their own personal journey through those choices.  The choices are as varied as the results, put together to give a fair picture of the state of electronic music today.

Evening rolls around and seating is rearranged in Pravda Studios to accommodate the ten year anniversary showcase for Lawrence English’s Room40 Label.  The rowed seating creates an almost academic atmosphere for the experimental labels offering.  The stage is filled with amplifiers, cassettes, effects boxes and a table crowded with laptops and controllers.  Seattle’s own Rafael Anton Irisarri takes the stage first with a modesty becoming of the sound he brings.  Beginning with a single low guitar note processed into a drone, upon which he builds layers of tones and overtones, pushed through his laptop into an ambient sound-scape.

Lawrence English takes the stage next and promptly suggests the audience abandon their chairs for spots near the front of the stage where they can lie on the floor.  In a matter of seconds the seemingly academic setting is transformed to something closer to a meditation hall.  Integral in English’s rig is a harmonium much like a guru would use to lead a kirtan. English’s has been constantly returned through the altitude changes while touring.  He notes of piece which he composed the year before with the harmonium, “what was beautiful last year would sound like ugly dissonance today.”  Fortunately he has other music prepared for today which exemplifies his own work in the realm of ambient noise for the audience now lying horizontal in near complete darkness.  Using a small nano control with Ableton he builds up what sounds to the ear like the shore of some cosmic beach.

Towards the tail end of the set, as English’s manipulated ‘white noise’ is combined with the harmonium, Grouper takes to the stage and begins working in her chain of cassette players to provide a smooth transition to her own set.  It begins with knob twiddling as she builds up a bed of sound sourced from her pile of pre-recorded cassettes.  She then picks up a guitar to act as a blanket, warming the chill vocals which lie comfortably in between.

As Ben Frost takes the stage to perform what one member of the audience calls, a soundtrack perfect for murder, across the street a line has started forming for the “Flying Lotus and Friends” showcase at Neumos.  Inside Truckasauras has filled the stage with with an assortment of analog and digital gear to lay down their breed of hardcore 8-bit.  The four piece unit has the energy of fun loving party throwers, but at the same time bridge electronic and traditional performance with a layer of musicality.  They are very much electronic musicians but they are also clearly a band.  It’s easy to understand why they are a local favorite.

Samiyam hits the stage next fresh off a tour down under and a bit hoarse as he introduces himself before going into his set.   Using a Roland 404 on batteries he performs his cross between a live performance and DJ set.  Thrown in the mix are some classics from M.O.P. and Dilla, in addition to new Samiyam treats.  He’s a hip-hop head at an electronic music festival, but he works his sound in, perfectly illustrating how the two no longer need be understood as separate entities.

Mary Anne Hobbes has flown into Seattle for the evening (though she will have to make a flight in the morning to play a San Francisco date before returning to the festival for her own show), and one of the primary reasons is to be able to catch the next act.  Milwaukee native Brainfeeder Lorn steps behind his Maschine next to lay down what can only be described as one of the heaviest sounds on the scene.  Filled in with deep basslines, spectrum defying drums and clashing synths, the set fills the room with an aggressive exuberance that the crowd goes wild for.

Eskmo hits next with a stunning set that previews his self titled Ninja Tune release out the first week of October.  Lorn’s aggression is replaced by swaying melodies and Eskmo’s own manipulated vocals.  While not the first to bring vocals into an electronic set, Eskmo does have a certain touch, at one time synthetic and another intimate, all over a sound which fits perfectly into the Brainfeeder lineup.

As Eskmo draws his set to a close, the crowd is ready for the headliner and Decibel veteran Flying Lotus to take the stage.  Surprisingly though, as he fiinally approaches, it is who he has brought with him that garners the most attention.  Wearing a red and white varsity jacket with a roaring tiger embroidered on the back, patches from the 80′s cartoon, three feathers sticking out of his ear and the tail from Davy Crocket hat hanging from his pants is Thundercat.  He steps in front of the bass cabinet and plugs in his bass which also has the Thundercat emblem on the back, while his brother Ronald Bruner Jr. crosses to the other side of the stage to man the drum kit, looking like the Fresh Prince of Bel Aire on a fitness plan.  Lotus stands between the two of them with his laptop propped up and his controller at his fingers to launch into a landmark trio set.

As expected the first thing that hits you is bass.  As Lotus works soundbites from his new album in Ableton, he leaves the majority of their instrumentation in the mix including drum and bass which are then doubled by the live instruments.  It makes for what one would think to be a cluttered mix, but as the songs build a new type of groove is found uncharacteristic of electronic music.  The organic funk of the instrumentation serves to highlight the manipulated funk of Lotus’ production fusing into yet another sound to add to Lotus’ credits.  There’s a connection between the musicians on stage which calls back to the classic jazz trio, trading riffs and precise improvisational timing.  All of the musicians on stage come from jazz lineages, and what they have come together to produce on the stage is an upgrade of that aesthetic for the digital age.  They ride in trio mode for about a half an hour, track after track perfectly mixed like a DJ set.  Lotus then takes some time to solo with his standard fair before hitting back with the band through two threats from security to pull the plug.

As the Neumos staff  usher the audience out, more than a few are inspecting their ears.  The decibel levels have gone way past the red.  Backstage as Lotus goes into his dressing room he keeps repeating “I’m deaf.”  Bruner echos the sentiment sharing that he can’t hear out of his left ear.  Yet both outside and backstage is all smiles.  FlyLo and his friends have brought a sonic convergence well worthy of Decibel.