In addition to Halloween-themed music mixes to entertain you this weekend, sounds and images from experimental to trance are echoing through the Internets this week. We’ve got the details on Create Digital Motion.

For visualists and a range of out-there-leaning audiovisual and sonic acts, France and the rest of Europe have a festival streaming online:

Festival Stream: French and European Visualists at Cinesthesy 1.0 Today and Saturday

And 11:30p US Eastern is SWiY, with more gear than we have (as pictured above):
Halloween Stream Tonight: SWiY Live Trance and Gearlust

Scare your cat and your significant other and keep the sounds going all weekend, I say. That is, if you’re not roaming America scaring up votes (that’s important, too).

I’m thrilled to be here in Berlin this week, before heading to Ireland for Dublin’s DEAF Festival. (More on that shortly.) Tuesday night, I’m playing a set at Dense Record Shop, a wonderful record store that also does live sets and has its own bar.

It’s a cozy, informal venue so if you are in Berlin, drop by and say hi — it’s a chance for all of us to meet in person. 8p sharp – 10p all over.

Dense Shop

Location

You can also find the event on Facebook

Berliners, I can’t wait! Rest of the world: more on some of the music stuff soon.

If you could control your music with all of your digits, and get interactive feedback on a display, what would your setup look like? Expert Lemur user and software engineer Bryant Place has one such answer. It shows off just how much the Lemur’s software has evolved over a series of revisions, and reveals a bit of what can go into performing with Ableton Live.

Photos/screens: Bryant Place. Used by permission. (Click for larger versions.)

Side note: for a look at live touch interfaces with Native Instruments’ Reaktor, see our story for our NI minisite. To really understand how touch is impacting live playing, I think it’s helpful to see what’s going on with different software platforms.

Multi-touch, Lemur, and Going Live

Part of the appeal of Ableton Live is that it behaves as a hybrid between arrangement software and musical instrument. Early versions even carried the tagline “Sequencing Instrument,” but that sums up the problem: instruments generally aren’t sequencers, and visa versa. To “play” your sequencer live is challenging enough, but added to that is the fundamental mouse-pointer interface that’s been in the marketplace for over twenty years. To really control live, you need more direct access.

The Lemur multi-touch hardware promised just such control when unveiled. In an early review, I saw this as promising but cautioned that the custom software the Lemur runs was overly rigid. Since then, firmware updates have gradually added more custom features.

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I got to watch as Bryant showed off a set of templates he’s been developing that exploit these features for deeper, more interactive control of Ableton Live. Bryant’s session was brief enough that you could blink and miss it, but an awed crowd of assembled Live gurus revealed that he’d showed something really special. It’s a dream multi-touch setup. He’s using the new v2 firmware for Lemur, which we see in a screenshot from Jazz Mutant has also been used in their own template for Live. Not all the features come from v2 firmware, but those tabs make a big difference, and I can imagine continuing to go hog-wild with envelopes and such.

The basic idea: set up effects for live performance and make them readily accessible from the futuristic-looking, multi-touch, colored Lemur control surface. With a few compact screens, and interface elements that respond dynamically to what’s happening in software, it’s possible to use touch gestures to control elaborate effects arrangements in ways that would be very different than the results you could get from conventional knobs and faders.