There are festivals, and then there’s Unsound. While so much in electronic music programming walks the line between club accessibility and more adventurous experimentation, some time falling over one side or the other of that divide, Unsound consistently hits the center of the bullseye with some of the most creative, imaginative music around. It’s just smart music. You can catch Unsound in its home city of Krakow, Poland, or you can find it as it pulls an international roster of artist to the metropolis New York City. And, at the moment, you can enjoy it from the comfort of wherever you call home, thanks to a nice stream from Hype Machine and Unsound that hops to the top of our must-listen queue for Monday.

Who’s in store? Alongside Polish animation and other goodness, expect a night of ladies whose names begin with the letter J working with experimental sounds (LA’s Julia Holter, Norway’s Jenny Hval, New York’s Julia Kent), a reimagining of Herbie Hancock by Poland’s LXMP, Germany’s wonderful Pole and the ongoing tour of Monolake’s visual-sonic masterwork, England’s Demdike Stare, New York’s own ambient imagineer Zemi17, and bass mainstays like Sepalcure and 2562. There are talks on history, explorations of music technique and particularly performance, and even a tribute to (too-often unsung) Manhattan minimal pioneer La Monte Young. (That great herald of experimental sound, The Wire Magazine is involved in discussions.) I’m probably most disappointed myself not to witness the premiere of “TRINITY,” a promising-looking, epic exploration of nuclear testing in New Mexico by Biosphere and Lustmond, bringing together two of the world’s most sonically-imaginative artists.

If you can make it to Poland or Manhattan, I certainly endorse experiencing the festival in person, but in the meantime, let’s enjoy surveying its musical treats:

http://unsound.pl/en

Mastering – a step by step guide to good sound by monolake

Sadly, as Robert Henke concedes:

i still think it needs to be louder and it lacks dynamics and punch. I STILL THINK IT NEEDS TO BE LOUDER AND IT LACKS DYNAMICS AND PUNCH!

It’s like banging your head against a brick wall.

No further comment at this time.

As Max for Live matures, Ableton is working to convince more people to try this open-ended tool – and creations built for it – as a way of extending the experience of using Live for performance and production.

For years, music software has focused on trying to do everything you need, to be a solution to problems you haven’t even considered yet. But recently, we’ve seen a move to software that considers customization and extension a core feature – not just the province of the hard-core hacker or DIYer, but something basic to the tool. FL Studio, Renoise, Reaper, Kontakt, and Ableton Live, to name a few, each incorporate tools that allow scripting, customization, and custom instruments, effects, sequencers, and other tools. (Each does it in very different ways, I might add.) In place of from-scratch construction, these tools build on the capabilities of the software in which they’re hosted.

And even if you don’t personally decide to take on scripting or patching, that means you can take advantage of unique contraptions made by other users. These creations aren’t just hacking for hacking’s sake: they meet specific musical needs, and make tools more practical and expressive. Like knowing the reeds on a wind instrument or tuning on a guitar, they’re part of how musicians are able to make their instrument their own.

Of course, unlike a new effect or workflow tweak, getting your users to embrace an open-ended tool takes time, and it may not be for everyone. We’ve been following recent efforts by Ableton to respond to feedback from their user community. While these fall short of the ability to distribute patches to all Ableton Live users – something I and others have advocated – they do make Max for Live more affordable and patches built for it more accessible.

CDM talked to Ableton’s Daniel Büttner in February about some of the changes on the developer side, both in terms of improvements to the tools and guidelines to make patches better:
Ableton Delivers Max for Live Improvements and Guidelines, Responds to Feedback; Full Details

In the last couple of weeks, Ableton has made offerings to the user side.

Max for Live Sale: First, right now you can get Max for Live for less. In the month of April, Max for Live is free with a purchase of Ableton Suite 8 or upgrades to Suite from the Lite and Intro versions. If you have Live 1-8 or Suite 7 and upgrade to 8, unfortunately, Max for Live isn’t free – but it is half off. I’d like to see more aggressive, permanent pricing from Ableton if they want widespread adoption of the tool – it seems to me that offering a “Suite” without this key component is complex for users to understand and makes budgeting for Live needlessly difficult. But that’s my prerogative as a critic and writer, just as it’s their prerogative to determine that what I’m saying doesn’t make sense for their business. In the meantime, I can certainly recommend the Suite purchase if you’re getting Live new or upgrading from an intro edition.

Updated: Current Suite owners qualify for a 30% coupon which they should have received via email, says David from Ableton via comments.

If you’re considering Max for Live but aren’t sure if it’s for you, there’s also a 30-day free trial – always a good bet.

Featuring Max for Live patches: More interesting than the pricing stuff is the fact that you can get some truly spectacular patches for Max for Live, and Ableton is doing more to highlight the work of some of the most talented, creative artists working with the tool.

As readers have repeatedly observed, maxforlive.com is a terrific resource for Max for Live lovers and those wanting fun patches to play with. It now includes a Featured Devices page curated by Ableton’s sound team, with some really great, free stuff.

Ableton has also added both new basic devices – including some oft-requested options, like an LFO – and featured artist creations, too.

Max for Live Highlights from Artists

Artist endorsements can be a mixed bag – they sometimes feel forced, an attempt to get some fame to rub off on a product. Not so here: as with, say, some of the recent gems on the Reaktor side from the likes of Tim Exile, the featured artists working with Max for Live really are pushing the technology and the medium.

Robert Henke, aside from being an Ableton co-founder and conceptually steering a lot of their direction, has one of the best recent Max for Live creations. Monolake helped establish the granular sound on the electronic palette in the 90s, so it’s little surprise that a Henke-designed granular device is a terrific instrument. See the video at top – it’s one of the best reasons yet to try Max for Live.

Kapture by Liine is an eminently-practical entry, sucking all of the parameters in a Live set into snapshots and allowing you to morph through them. I’ve been testing this paired with their iOS app on an iPad, and it’s terrific; I’ll finally talk about it once I’ve wrapped my head around some good examples.

And, I should say, it’s thoroughly enjoyable seeing Richie Hawtin back as Plastikman – the work he’s doing on the tour is exactly the sort of audiovisual electronic performance I hope we see more of from artists famous and unknown alike.

There’s also a House-style beat generator by Alexkid (video, above), and of course the obligatory APC step sequencer (though check out more step sequencers below).

This isn’t just about pure electronic dance music, though. Henrik Schwarz has a new edition of a device that fits notes to a musical scale, as relevant to jazz artists working with electronic instruments as electronica artists. Katsuhiro Chiba makes some classic retro-80s synths that could appeal to keyboardists in a wide variety of genres. I love seeing versions of the Yamaha TX81Z or simple, analog-style Sep2.

The most welcome offering, though, may be the addition of new LFOs, which allow synth-style modulation of any Live devices. Manuel Poletti has a powerful LFO collection with plenty of options for assigning modulation wherever you like. (See our previous, unintentionally-controversial, coverage of LFO modulation in Live, and more examples on the maxforlive.com site.)

Find the artist devices, descriptions, and downloads at the main Ableton Max for Live site:
http://www.ableton.com/maxforlive

New, Essential Devices

Max for Live itself has added 21 devices that give the tool a more complete set of basic building blocks for patchers. That’s good news, in that it means a lot less reinvention – and because the value of Max for Live itself goes way up.

New in the release this spring are LFOs, envelope followers (for using an audio signal to modulate parameters), randomizers, and multichannel routing devices.

Indeed, my only concern here is that many of us hoped to see some of these capabilities in “native” Ableton Live devices, rather than Max for Live patches. An LFO to many users is an essential built-in module that would benefit the software, as it has been in some rival tools, comparable to tools like chord and pitch manipulation for MIDI included in Live.

I don’t know that the LFO per se is necessarily fundamental to Live. But I do hope that Ableton continues to develop native devices for the Live environment. Max for Live could serve a useful purpose here – as a testing bed and prototyping tool, as it has been intended – and aid in determining which tools really do need to be included with Live itself.

More (updated info) on the included devices:
What Comes with Max for Live

And Don’t Forget…

Even with all these Ableton-provided goodies on their site, it’s worth visiting community sites like the unofficial maxforlive.com.

There are some gems at maxforlive.com, including the featured page:
http://maxforlive.com/featured/

– some of those, in turn, chosen by Ableton. Pictures of some of my favorites:

Let us know how you’re using Max for Live, if you find it fits into your workflow or if you focus on the core Ableton software instead. And certainly, if you’re a Max for Live patch developer or user and want to show off your favorites (including your own), we’d love to hear from you.

In the northern hemisphere, it’s winter. Really. Here’s today’s winter storm warning for the New York City area, as composed by the bards of the US government’s NOAA National Weather Service:

SNOW…TRANSITIONS TO A WINTRY MIX OF SLEET…SNOW AND FREEZING RAIN AROUND MID MORNING…AND CONTINUES FOR MUCH OF THE DAY BEFORE BECOMING A PERIOD OF FREEZING DRIZZLE AND LIGHT SLEET THIS EVENING. A HEAVY MIX OF SNOW…SLEET AND FREEZING RAIN THEN DEVELOPS OVERNIGHT…LIKELY CHANGING TO ALL FREEZING RAIN WEDNESDAY MORNING…BEFORE GRADUALLY CHANGING TO RAIN BY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. THERE IS STILL SOME UNCERTAINTY ON THE EXACT TIMING OF CHANGEOVER WEDNESDAY…WHICH WILL HAVE AN IMPACT ON ICING AMOUNTS.

Feed that into a text to speech engine, sample it, add some absurdly long-tailed reverbs to a couple of sparse sparkling figures and lonely, symmetrical drums and you have an IDM hit on your hands.

Winter for me is a great time to listen to and make music, watching spirals of snow and sleet blow against my fifth-floor window. Canadian Mark Templeton has produced a wintry mix of his own with an extended ambient set for our friends at Percussion Lab radio. I could describe it, but it’s just too easy. Crackling layer of frost on a glacier in an ice storm of timbre blah blah blah. It’s beautiful.

Mark Templeton Winter Mix 2011 [Free download/stream from Percussion Lab]

It’s also worth another listen to Mark’s 2009 Sea Point EP. He’s a member of the small, tightly-curated stable of artists on Anticipate Records with Morgan Packard, Ezekiel Honig, and others.

My other choice in recent days, perfect for coding a new project in one of our string of snowstorms, is one of my favorite releases of 2009, Tim Hecker’s expansive LP “An Imaginary Country.” (available from many, many sources) It really does provide the sense of traversing a far-off land, an ambient outing that’s anything but featureless.

Official site:
http://www.sunblind.net/

Here’s what Robert Henke, Monolake and Ableton co-founder, had to say about winter to CDM:

In Berlin winter,
there are only two possibilities.
One: go with it, by creating cold,
icy wavetable sounds with low bit
resolution. No chorus! Avoid ‘nice’
chord progressions. C-minor on
a low octave is never wrong. If
melodies are a must, make sure
to have falling motives. Think
snowflakes, think rain and dirt! A
slight touch of melancholy also
can’t hurt. If creating your own
little glacier fails, put Joy Division
MP3s in your playlist.
Or, alternatively, create analog
warmth as compensation. Does
not need to be real analog; it
is only important that the user
interface provides you with some
visual clues of warmth. Wood
panels, warm color scheme,
vintage looking knobs. Add
reverb with chorus and a crackle
loop from an old record.
Talking about old records, it
cannot get warmer then witht
he fantastic new Honest Jones
Records release, “Springs of
Time”, a collection of 78s from the
EMI archive. Oldest possible vinyl.
Alcohol also helps, but I heard
there are minors visiting this
website, so stay away from that;
drink Tea.

What does winter (or summer, southern Hemisphere) mean for your music listening and production? What’s on your playlist or in your studio at the moment? Let us know.

We conclude with our friend Primus Luta this series on the Decibel Festival, both a compelling portrait of that event and a slice of the world of electronics and computer music today. Be sure to catch the other three portions of his series:

Decibel Log 1: Ean Golden, Gold Panda, Mux Mool, Lusine, Pantha Du Prince

Decibel Log 2: Robert Henke, Room40 Label, Flying Lotus and Friends

Decibel Log 3: Murcof, Mount Kimbie, Modeselektor, Teebs and More

Beneath the shadow of Seattle’s Space Needle, a tent has been erected in front of the open park green, which is enclosed by a fence. This isn’t the first time that Decibel has brought the festival to the park, but it does mark the first time that the public is being charged for it. In the early afternoon, while tourists flock to the landmark’s everyday attraction, around the perimeter, more than a few have found spots to lay down blankets for the afternoon free of charge.

Inside, divisions continue. The “dance floor” is in the front of the stage, under the tent. Behind the dance floor, artist Eric Orr is doing a live painting in front of couples and families picnicking with Decibel in the park, and behind them, in the beer lounge, Guinness is being served on tap. In spite of the partitioning, the speakers act as a uniting force, by way of the heavy dubstep being spun by Mat the Alien.

The sound in the park is big. Tourists travel to the top of the Space Needle only to discover the bass is traveling the 520 feet up to rattle windows. Matt is working the system to his advantage, allowing the volume to grow dynamically, coaxing a physical response out of the audience. Latecomers make their way in, filling out the lawn and invading the dance floor. As Mat’s set comes to a close, NastyNasty takes his turn at the controls, bringing a palpable energy the crowd almost instantly reflects back to him.

The heavy brostep is infectious; the dance floor is alive. It’s a strange lead-up to the more ambient hip-hop sound to follow. Some artists in a similar situation might find the setup a bit unnerving, but as Nosaj Thing sits in the wings rather than worry he enjoys himself, headnodding to the beat. As he sets up his laptop, the crowd packs in tighter. Then, with the press of an MPD pad, Nosaj shows why his peers consider him a true Ableton master.

While Bluetech takes the dB in the Park stage, other festivalgoers are packing in for the second Optical concert at the Benaroya Concert Hall. This evening there is noticeably more gear on stage, and apparently Noveller has it in her mind to throw as much as she can into her set. Loopers and pedals modify her guitar that is voiced using everything from scissors to packing bubbles. Behind her, the projection screen is filled with moving images that add a creative and intimate touch.

Between their onstage interactions and the way in which their two mediums are work together, one might think that musician Fennesz and visualist Lillevan were a touring act. The truth is that they just met at the festival and yet somehow developed a synergy bringing their work to its full potential.

Oneohtrix Point Never wears a headlamp while standing in front of his mixer and controller rack in complete darkness. His face is spotlighted, and glare from the headlamp on the equipment makes for an interesting effect on its own. Paired with the stunning visuals of Killingfrenzy, however, it all starts coming alive. Faces and figures pop from the screen with an eeriness pulled from scenic noise of Oneohtrix.

As people file out of the second Optical show, the doors are opening at the Baltic Room where Scuba has brought the Hotflush heavy weights to get the intimate dance floor going. Incyde gets things started with a seamless mix of the label’s signature melodic dubstep. As his set moves into Untold’s, the energy builds. A little harder, but no less melodic, the mood shifts from showcase to party. When label head Scuba takes to the decks rocking a Run-DMC style “Bro Step” t-shirt, the place is rocked into a frenzy. The small venue is now packed to the gills with people dancing. It sets a fine stage for the latest addition to the label, Sepalcure, who come ready to throw down a live Ableton duet session. Unfortunately the Baltic system is still recovering from the previous night. They manage to work their way through the set, but there’s an obvious sense of something missing throughout: the bass.

At Neumos, the system is keeping up with the heavy bounce as electronic music legend Kevin Saunderson traces techno back to its Detroit roots for the D25 Showcase. He’s jet lagged from a flight earlier in the day from China, but takes to the stage with the professionalism of a globetrotting superstar, because he is one, and whether the crowd knows this or not, they can feel it. The dance floor is packed, filled with smiles and slippery with sweat, as Saunderson spins a soulful set that does not give one’s legs one seconds rest.

If you never associated Detroit techno with big drums, Carl Craig sets things straight from the first needle drop. Easily the hardest hitting kicks of the entire festival, they never let up their pounding the whole time Craig is at the helm. Like Saunderson before him, however, the drums serve as a characteristic not the emphasis. The emphasis is a shared between the melodies and grooves, which keep the crowd screaming in approval while the kick holds them to the beat.

A misty rain starts as staff ushers people out. Traffic is headed toward afterparties on the edges of the city. The rain lingers with the crowds outside the Motor afterparty where Pezzner, Soul Clap, and Theo Parrish are keeping the four steady on the floor. Further down the block at Monkey Loft, beats are being slung by Dibiase, Devonwho, XI, and Lorn.

The sky has cleared by the early afternoon of the final day for Decibel. The faces in the park show signs of appreciation, for the sun, the music, and the festival for making it come together. On stage, Praveen of Sepalcure shows his credentials with a DJ set filled with grooves perfect for a Sunday afternoon. Mary Anne Hobbs picks up where Praveen leaves off and then shifts into next gear to the heavier side of dubstep. Finger guns are shooting and wings are taking flight as she takes Decibel through a set of bangers she helped make popular. The energy of the crowd matches her own, and she rushes onto the dance floor for her last track. With the crowd well warmed up, Hobbs passes control over to Rinse FM staple Plastician, who keeps the brostep knocking hard in the late afternoon sun.

As dusk sets in, the Triple Door invites festival goers into the seated dinner venue for the final Optical performance. It’s a beautiful room with relatively comfortable seating, but as a dinner venue, the “white noise” of waiters poses a challenge. The delicate balance between the stage and the kitchen becomes obvious during the first set by sanso-xtro. She sits on her knees before an array of electronics and other instruments and then carefully loops sounds from them into ambient melodies.

Decibel favorite Tim Hecker takes the stage next with Lillevan, who finds a way to breathe new life into his visuals through the emotive textures being inspired by Tim Hecker. From vivid colors to stark duality, the descriptors actively work on both the sonic and aural experience.

For the final Optical performance, Tycho begins solo with his ambient sound. The visual backdrop, which silhouettes him, works as moving graphic design, as calculated and precise as the modes within the music. He introduces the festival to his four piece set, which fills out the music with more organic textures.

At Neumos, the crowd for the Decibel Finale looks like they have been partying for five days, but they still have a little life left in them. Fax wastes no time getting them going with deep techno grooves. The soulfulness caresses while the beats force hands to clap out the steady rhythm.

Robert Henke is joined by Tarik Barri on visuals for a Monolake set for future Decibel Festivals. His crisp drums are split into surround sound so that kicks are coming from behind while the snare cracks in the front. Behind him the visuals of collaborator Barri are an animated portrait of Henke’s computerized soul, starting and stopping into a multimedia dance personified on the dance floor. It speaks to everything Henke said in his earlier lecture as well as the type of convergence Decibel is trying to exemplify with the festival.

Pepe Bradock plays the final set for the evening. It is up and lively, but after five days, well past midnight hour on a Sunday bodies are telling festival goers it is over before the staff can put them out. They go back to their everyday lives with what they were able to extract from the densely packed portrait of electronic music in 2010. It is broad in scope, with an audience that continues to grow, and sounds that continue to evolve into different forms, honoring the history and embracing the new, so that it may continue, as strong and stronger, in the years to come. Is that a description of the festival or the music it represents both? It works for both, and for that reason Decibel Festival 2010 can be seen as a success.

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.

Being a digital musician requires a new set of skills, a precise tack between the forces of engineering and creativity. Robert Henke aka Monolake is always someone I find thought-provoking, not only because he’s so open and articulate, but because he seems uniquely focused on balancing those two sides of his personality. As a media artist and producer, his work relies heavily on his own technological invention, but he is also able to keep true to his own aesthetic compass.

For acoustic evidence of where Robert’s mind is exploring, his full-length album Silence, released last month on his own Imbalance label, reverberates with clarity. To my own ears, its crystalline rhythms and finely-honed, always-foreground timbres and textures recall all the best of Monolake through the years, back to the early, pre-Ableton collaboration between Robert and (now Ableton CEO) Gerhard Behles. (For an eloquent review, see Fact Magazine’s take.)

As far as engineering in the sense of recording and production, Robert did a terrific interview with engineer/musician Caro Snatch for her blog; she gets some fascinating answers out of him and they even talk about his technique of avoiding compression on electronic sources. But I was interested in how engineering can work in the compositional sense: with open-ended tools like Ableton Live and Max/MSP, how do you create compositional systems? How do you wrestle with the potential of Max inside Live? Where do you draw limits?

As always, Robert has some sharp ideas – whether fodder for inspiration or disagreement, I think you’ll find things worth talking about. And indeed, while technology figures prominently, I think you’ll find some ideas that are really fundamentally about music, about compositional intent, thinking about sound, and thinking about rhythm.

PK: It seems that you’ve always had a really particular approach to timbre, and that it’s especially focused and evolved on this record. There’s a certain purity of tone to which you tend to gravitate, as I hear it. Can you talk a bit about how you approach timbral color?

RH: I can only nail it down to personal taste. I enjoy timbres with inharmonic content, and I like the contrast between very sharp transients and very lush, airy sounds.

I know that Silence, as with your other work, combines synthesized and found sounds. There is a sense that you get to an almost atomic level with each, however, that the synthesized are becoming organic and the recorded sounds are deconstructed to the point that become almost primitive and synthesized. Is there a different approach to each of these, or is that something that happens naturally?

The ambiguity of sonic events always fascinates me. That border between ‘real’ and ‘synthetic’ is a quite interesting one, not only in sound design, but also in visual arts. Working with synthetic sound generation sharpens my senses for the real sounds around me, and often I am surprised by how much they can blend. We are not talking any more of sound generation with a single square wave oscillator and a lowpass filter, but methods that are capable of creating highly complex and rich timbres. Those methods’ sonic definition matches the complexity of real sounds and this is where the fun starts. I like to place a recording of a metal thing next to a physical model of a metal thing next to a processed sample next to an FM timbre and see how they become a nice ensemble of similar sounds.

What’s your workflow like now in Ableton Live? On some level, it’s a tool that does things that you have conceived or asked for, or that reworks things you’ve created. On another, of course, it’s also this commercial tool that has been adapted to a generalized audience. Are there areas of it that you tend to work in most? Are there areas or features you tend to ignore or even avoid?

I try to avoid ‘content’. I am not interested in ‘throwing beat loops together’. I do not use presets from other people when it comes to synthesis, this all is just not my way of thinking. Why should I leave that great part of composition which is coming up with interesting timbres, to someone else? I am also not using time stretching / warping as a tool to match beats. I don’t like time stretch artefacts, unless I drive it in the very extreme as a special effect. I don’t need factory groove templates, in fact I never you groove at all, if i want to achieve it, I move notes by hand.

Apart from that, I’d say I use everything Live has to offer. There is not typical workflow, it highly depends on what I want to do. The most significant difference to the old pre-Live times is to me that I can make lots of sketches without any special idea in mind, just let go, and save the result once I am bored with it. And much later I can open all those sketches, and see if anything in there is of interest. Then I grab that element and continue working on the basis of this. I have a lot of complex tree structures of fragments on my hard-disk, and this a great source of material and inspiration.

Recently, you shared some of your early, personal Max patches as Max for Live creations. Were any of these patches used on Silence?

I don’t mean to focus exclusively on the technology, but it seems that these Max patches – even more than any element of Live – really embody some of your aesthetic and taste, yes? They’re a bit like experiencing a Monolake album interactively. Do you conceive them in that way, as a sort of compositional thought formed into a tool?

The tools have a strong influence on the result. Take the Monolake PX-18 sequencer. Its way of expanding a one bar loop into something that repeats in longer cycles is based on such a rigid concept, that it enforces a quite specific rhythmical approach. Some patterns are simply not possible, some are very easy to achieve. This is exciting and this is very musical; a piano is an instrument which makes it very easy to treat all twelve notes of a well tempered scale the same. And it is an instrument which makes it impossible to play with any notes that do not fit in such a scale. This is exactly the same interesting tension between enabling and inhibiting expression as with the rhythmical limitation of the PX-18.

There is an interesting interaction going on between developing tools and achieving musical results. The whole process is far from being linear and entirely result orientated. The idea at the beginning is shaped by first results and experiences gained from playing with a simple prototype of a part of the functionality, this drives the further development of the tool, but also influences the musical idea. If I try to build a granular time freezer, and after initial tests I figure out that I need a lot of overlapping grains to get the sound I want, I can also start thinking in swarms of particles, and this might lead to musical ideas that shape how I try to improve the grain thing. Working this way often provides far more interesting results than sticking to an initial plan. As an interesting side note, this way of thinking also finds its way more and more into general software/hardware development and interface/functionality design. The tools of the future need to _feel_ right. One cannot design a multi touch screen application on a piece of paper, implement it and think it will work. It would, technically, but it might not be inspiring to use and therefor most likely not a success in a competitive market.

A few years ago, when you were in New York, you made a couple of comments that stuck with me. One was that you thought that the tech press sometimes wasn’t critical enough of technology, that, for instance, they weren’t saying critical things about Ableton Live. Another was that you felt like there was less need for Max/MSP partly because of what Live itself does. I’m curious if you have any new thoughts on either of those?

I find myself doing a lot of things in Max these days, since the integration in Live made it so easy and rewarding. When I made that Max statement in NYC, I felt that coding is a trap when it comes to actually creating music. One simply does spend to much time with non-musical problems.In many ways, Max 5 and Max for Live reduced the time needed to get results. And this makes the whole package very attractive again.

I started teaching sound design at the Berlin University of Arts a year ago. I can show my students how to create a simple two-operator FM synthesizer with an interesting random modulation within fifteen minutes and the result is a Live set including the Max for Live part, which I can save and send to the students as an email so they can open it again an continue working on it. If stuff can be done that fast, it leaves enough headroom to actually use it in a musical context. In retrospective a lot of 90s IDM music was way to much driven by exploring technology. At some point one has to step back and say: okay, now lets actually have a look at the composition and not only at the technical complexity of the algorithm.

So, what’s the role of the press in this? One experience I gain from reading the Ableton user forum and from talking with students is that there is a great amount of insecurity about which technology to use. It’s the abundance paradox. Which software sounds best? Which compressor do i need to use? Which plugins do I need for mastering housy dub music with a hint of pop and some acoustic guitar? Having the choice between 5000 compressor plugins whilst not understanding what makes a compressor really sound the way it does it pretty much my idea of hell. So often I have that impulse telling the world: hey, you can use the sidechain input of the compressor you already have in Live, and you can feed that sidechain with a slightly delayed version of the original signal. You could also apply saturation, filtering, or even reverb or again an instance of the compressor in that side chain signal to shape its timing and response to its input. This will have a result of the compression curve, and this means you can build anything from a very normal compressor up to the most exotic effect you can imagine. And you can store those structures for later re-use. You can automate every single aspect of it. You can use ten or twenty instances of it in a song. Are you guys aware that you have more power right in front of you than the best music producers and hardware designers just ten years ago would have dreamed off?

I simply do not want to read any more articles about new compressor, be it hardware or software, unless it provides insight into the amazing possibilities we already have. I don’t want to read anymore sound quality discussions that deal with the last bit of a 24-bit file in a world where people listen to mp3 over mobile phones and enjoy those artefacts.

The most exciting new music comes from young kids guys running some audio software in a bedroom, listening to the result over a shitty hi-fi and use Melodyne all the way wrong. Those folks do not read gear magazines, they could not care less about yet another mastering EQ, but create the most stunning beauty. If people talk too much about gear I usually do not expect too much good music. I am often trapped in this twilight zone between engineer and composer too, so I know what I am talking about here…

As far as your own music, do you find you need some critical distance from a tool as an artist? Or does that fall away once you’re in the process of actually making the record? (It seems, after all, we’re all a bit spoiled by the various excellent tools we have at our disposal.)

Deadlines help. If I know that a project needs to be finished, I simply stop investing time in technology at some point, and instead use what’s there. Its a question of discipline and experience too. I try to teach my students that if they are working on a technically challenging project they need to define a deadline for the technical side. If not, they might work till the very last moment on technical stuff and loose focus on the artistic part. At the end, the result counts, not the beautiful MAX patch, which could possible create a nice result.

And have you ever considered trying to return to just building something simple in, say, Max, and limiting yourself to that? Or are you able to find necessary formal limitations in the tools you have?

I am constantly limiting myself. I set up a multi-dimensional network of constraints and bounce off its walls. Exhausting but it helps getting stuff done. A typical constraint: No more patching in Max till that project is finished, or try to get all Melodyne processing done in one afternoon and use those results.

I’m particularly interested in how you conceive rhythm. It seems like some of the ideas about sequencing rhythm in ATOM are also present here. Some of these rhythms are relatively symmetrical, pulse-like. Then you have these stuttering rhythms, as though a vibration has been set in motion and is naturally playing itself out in space. How do you work rhythmically?

I contrast totally straight 16th grooves with material that itself constitutes a rhythmical quality off that grid. In ‘Silence’ obviously I often used gravity driven processes with their inherent accelerations. Or I played notes with an arpeggiator that is not synced to song time but where I control its rate with a slider. Something Gerhard already did on the very first Monolake track ‘Cyan’ in 1995. Silence offers quite a few hidden connections to Monolake history. My general approach to groove is simple: I change things in time till it feels right.

What was your compositional process like, generally, for these works? Did they start with some of those sounds? With a rhythmic motive?

There is no general rule. I often just open Live to explore an idea, and end up doing something else because I found an interesting detail along the way. Or I have to work on a highly specific project, and have to discard a lot of the results because they do not work in a given context. Instead of throwing them away, I keep them and this might form the basis for another composition.

The title, “Silence,” certainly recalls John Cage. Was that intentional? Were there other meanings here? In an album that’s not silent, what is the role of silence?

Silence is such a great concept. There is no silence, unless in a vacuum, its that great mystic world which cannot exist in our world. Also, in music the time between the musical events is as important as the events itself. But I really leave it up to the associations of the listener to make sense of the title. And of the liner notes and the photographs and the music. I think there is a lot of room for all sorts of connections and connotations.

When we talked at the end of last year, we got to reflect a bit about winter. I’m editing this as I watch a snowstorm here in Manhattan, having come from snowstorms in Stockolm. It seems that winter is again a thread on this record. How did winter play into the album?

I grew up in the Bavarian countryside. Winter there equals silence, introversion, deep thinking, and general inwards focus. I like this.

http://monolake.de/
Free Max for Live patch downloads: http://monolake.de/technology/m4l.html
Silence: http://monolake.de/releases/ml-025.html

Inside a computer, digital music is entirely unseen. But translate it into the tangible world, and it can be anything you imagine – not limited by acoustic reality or practicality, music can become three-dimensional sculpture.

For artist Christopher Bauder and composer Robert Henke, ATOM’s light and sound sculpture found a three-dimensional matrix of balloons as its medium. Flashing in hypnotic patterns and moving into different configurations, accompanied by live laptop music from Henke (aka Monolake), music and visuals become an inseparable fusion.

ATOM received its North American premiere at Montreal’s MUTEK in May. That turned out to be perfect programming, as it placed ATOM in a week that featured complementary work from artists Artificiel. Henke says some of his matrix manipulations – and even the specific Max/MSP patches from ATOM – came from collaboration with Artificiel and their light bulbs. For their part, at MUTEK they unveiled a new audiovisual etude called POWEr Play involving a live-sampled Tesla Coil. The science fair ethos of ATOM and POWEr Play could have been gimmicky or overly fixated on spectacle, but in these pieces, it was anything but. Both works contemplated their subject matter so thoughtfully that balloons and electrical coils seemed perfectly natural media for the audiovisual imagination, and audiences were left marveling at phenomena in a way too rare in 2009.

Video episode at Blip.tv [includes mobile/desktop video downloads]
YouTube Part 1 and Part 2 (if you prefer YouTube for viewing)

It’s worth downloading the video above and really getting to soak up some of this piece when you have time. I also have an audio interview of a conversation with Robert and Christopher immediately following one of the performances.

You’ll hear Christopher’s voice first, followed by the unmistakable percussive enthusiasm of Robert. For me, the best part of the interview was hearing them discuss whether you should notice some of the unintentional randomness of drifting balloons or technical hiccups, and how they structured the work formally with a palette of possible balloon patterns.

Download the audio interview

[podcast]http://createdigitalmusic.com/files/media/podcasts/2009/06/cdmsounds_atomhenkebauder.mp3[/podcast]

For more on POWEr Play, see my Montreal flat mate Greg Smith writing for Rhizome – and stay tuned for the CDM audio interview, coming next week:
power play – artificiel at mutek [Serial Consign Blog]
Variable Frame Rate: Multimedia Performance at MUTEK 2009 [Rhizome]

More information:
Atom project Information at monolake.de
Text interview by Bertram Niessen for Digimag magazine, October 2007, also at monolake.de

Eno had Music for Airports. It’s fitting that Monolake would do Music for Jet Lag. Robert Henke writes about this month’s free download:

Since I also have been flying a lot recently, I named it after one of the most annoying side effects of modern transportation and mixed it in a way that reflects that dizzy feeling of being hyper active and totally asleep at the same time. ( "Last call for mister Robert Henke, flying to Berlin, please come to gate B 154 IMMEDIATELY or we will unload your luggage !!!!!!!!!" )

I am myself recovering from jetlag on the way to Portugal, so the timing is perfect. In a way, I have to say I sometimes oddly enjoy the disorienting feeling. I don’t think it’d be terribly addictive, but it’s a physical, profound reminder of traveling a great distance, something you could otherwise ignore in the age of absurdly-fast jet travel.

Grab the download here:

Free Downloads of the Month [yetlag, May 2009 – should be archived if you’re catching this late]

Installation details:

http://monolake.de/installations/lufthansa.html

The installation is fascinating in itself: a Max/MSP-powered, interactive sound score for a giant flight simulator, a model of the presence of jets, travel, and air traffic control. Robert did the sound; Christopher Bauder of white void was the concept and very elegant visual design. (See also Aaron Koblin’s striking Processing-based visual piece Flight Patterns, which seems to have embedded itself on a certain airborne digital zeitgeist. The United States becomes a feathery web of connections and flying traffic. You can imagine how this might continue to be mined in sound.)

As we work to keep our creative process flowing, I especially love the idea of focusing on a feeling to get a production started, as Monolake did here. So often, it’s too easy to get caught up in something technical or some very particular idea, then lose that in the process. By focusing on a feeling or deeper sentiment, it’s possible to remain connected to the ethos of what the track really means to us.

Of course, travel too much, and that may just wind up being … well, jet lag.

Meanwhile, as I listen to more music piped through airport terminals and even Metro stations, I wish Eno’s original idea had caught on.

Ableton co-founder and general visionary Robert Henke (also known as Monolake) gave a full-length workshop in New Zealand recently. If you’re up for 90 minutes of discussion of musical and sonic techniques in Live, plus a look at his unique Monodeck controller, the whole video is there. But that’s not the main reason the video is making its way around the Interwebs. It’s because there’s a bit of a bombshell right at the beginning of the footage:

He says, outright, you don’t need 64-bit sound to get “audio quality.” You don’t even need 16-bit all the time.

Okay, maybe that’s not such a radical thought in and of itself. Oh, yeah, except for one thing — the 64-bit summing engine he’s talking about happens to be the one in Ableton Live 7.

Video by Tom Cosm, via AudioLemon

Some people are already assuming this means Ableton has somehow betrayed them (well, in fairness, Robert does say the summing engine is just a marketing gimmick). And what about Cakewalk? Robert doesn’t mention them by name, but the only DAW that’s been trumpeting 64-bit mixing and signal processing is SONAR.

In fact, far from conflicting with Robert’s vision of sound, Ableton Live 7 really embodies it. And as for the Cakewalk thing — well, that’s complicated, because the term “64-bit” applies to a number of basically unrelated topics dealing with sound and computing. But none of that matters as much as one thing: if it sounds good, it is good.

Ableton’s Lo-Fi Voodoo — And Choice

Live 7 really does reflect Robert’s approach to sound and sound design. I say that not to try to make you go out and buy Live, but because I’ve been using Live nearly since it was released, and really enjoy the opportunity to get to use a tool that does have a point of view about sound.

Look at the other features in the program, like re-worked effects plug-ins. From the beginning, I think a lot of Live’s effects plug-ins have been badly misunderstood — a topic that came up recently on the CDM forums. The original reverb, the compressor, and some of the more recent additions are fantastic tools for coloring the sound of your work. Judge them as a conventional reverb or compressor, and frankly, they may turn you off. But forget your expectations there and look at them as timbral tools, and they’re great. (They also really do have a range — so once you know how to use them, you can make music that doesn’t necessarily sound like Monolake’s.)

Part of what Live 7 seems to be about is giving you a choice — if you need a great-sounding conventional compressor, for instance, and don’t want the pain of having to bring in a third-party plug-in, the new Live compressor is a valuable addition. But the old, odd compressor modes are there, too.

If you keep watching the video, Robert talks more about what he means — and it goes well beyond the issue of 64-bit summing. In synthesis, for instance, Robert demonstrates that using lower bit depth — bit depth below even 16-bit — can add harmonic content. A common, oft-repeated misunderstanding — one that’s been in the press a lot lately — is that lower bit depth contain “less” sound content. It’s just not true, ironically because distortion will add additional content to the sound. It’s a technique Robert uses regularly in Ableton’s Operator synth, and Ableton’s software does an excellent job of making these parts of the sonic palette available. But it goes well beyond Ableton; it’s part of why some musicians are embracing low-quality digital synths, chiptune music, and other technologies.

If you don’t feel like watching the whole video, by the way, one of Robert’s big tips is just to use this:

It’s the Spectrum tool in Live. (Naturally, there are equivalents in other programs and plug-ins.) What it gives you is a view of what’s happening in the sound itself, and couples something you can see with what you can already hear. That’s more valuable than anyone’s marketing.

What 64-bit Means

As for the 64-bit argument, we have to take at least a moment to examine what it is we’re talking about.

I’m equally dubious about just how essential having 64-bit dynamic headroom is. I’m not sure how valuable that particular feature is in Live 7; I’ll leave that to an engineer to decide. When SONAR came out with 64-bit processing, I talked to DSP engineers at AES at companies like Apogee. None could say they were really sure how useful that extra headroom is. There are a number of other sonic changes that do make the program sound “better,” so I don’t think the version 7 upgrade is snake oil, and I at least have the perspective of watching each upgrade since 1.0. And likewise, there are plenty of features in SONAR other than 64-bit mixing, so there’s no reason to get too hung up on this issue — for most people, I think it’s not even a relevant question.

But don’t write off “64-bit” yet, either. Cakewalk pushes 64-bit a lot; it’s true. But they’re actually talking about a number of different things:

• Other processing/synthesis: Cakewalk’s products now support a fully 64-bit signal chain. (Digidesign I’ve seen pitching its bit depth and rate, too, but while they’ve broken the 16-bit barrier they’re not at 64-bit, so hence the focus on Cakewalk.) Now, maybe 64-bit isn’t useful in a summing engine — that’s debatable. But there’s also the question of what it does for certain digital processes, like signal processing and synthesis, and in that case additional headroom could have potential. Live 7 only deals with the summing engine. Just as certain image processing techniques use higher-resolution colorspaces, even if you can’t see what’s going on, it’s possible some techniques will make use of this additional information digitally to produce things you can hear. That’s a discussion for another day, though.
• 64-bit memory addressing: More importantly, Cakewalk is also support 64-bit computing — something Ableton doesn’t do yet. On Windows, that means the ability to access larger amounts of RAM under Windows “x64″ or “64-bit” Vista. Totally unrelated to sound, but very, very useful for people using larger sample libraries. (It’s a non-issue on Mac OS X, because the Mac already addresses memory beyond 3-4GB without any extra effort.) I wouldn’t ding Cakewalk’s competitors for not supporting this, because the migration has been very slow for the whole Windows platform. But it is there — and it is a completely different subject.
• 64-bit processing: Running under 64-bit Windows also squeezes a little more performance out of a CPU. The gain isn’t huge, but it’s real. This isn’t yet available on Mac OS (that is, only parts of the OS currently support 64-bit processing), though it is available on Linux. (Even on Linux, though, people often choose to run 32-bit versions of the OS for compatibility.)

That’s a gross oversimplification of some of those issues, so feel free to discuss the finer points in comments, but you get the idea. There’s 64-bit in a summing engine, 64-bit in the rest of your signal chain, 64-bit as a way of getting access to more RAM, and 64-bit as a way of making use of 64-bit CPUs.

And then there’s 4-bit as a way of making blippy bleepy sounds.

Low Fidelity: Not Just For IDM

That said, the original point really isn’t marketing, new features in Live or any other program, computation, or audio theory.

It’s about a simple point: what sounds good, is good. And if you want to sound good, you need to listen. If you keep watching the video, that underlies everything Robert is saying, and I have to agree.

It’s easy to watch someone using downsampling or lower-bitrate / lower-bit depth / lower-fidelity sound sources and think, oh, sure, if you’re from Berlin and want to do IDM all the time, that’s great. But as Robert points out, some of the music we love best wasn’t even recorded and processed using 16-bit, let alone 192kHz, 64-bit digital audio.

This very issue came up as we were talking to Hank Shocklee. Part of the early hip-hop sound, the Public Enemy sound, was a function of the lower-fidelity sampling mechanisms on early digital samplers. And these sound nothing like Berlin IDM. (In fact, a lot of the electronica sound and its approach to the technology is deeply indebted to American hip-hop and African-American artists.)

That doesn’t mean less is more, either, necessarily — just that it can be part of your sonic palette, of the choices you make when making your music.

Digital technology is now old enough to have a history; it’s old enough to have classics. I’m all for exploring ways of pushing the envelope. Want to really test whether higher bit depth, higher sampling frequencies, and new technologies can make new sounds? Go for it. There’s no reason you can’t do that, and still remember the possibilities and history at the other end of the spectrum (pardon the pun).

If it sounds good, it is good. And that’s the problem with talking about “audio fidelity.” More is not always more. One thing is not always better than another. It really is about finding the sound you want to get. Engineers can build the expertise to help you realize that — but no amount of science can say one sound is superior to another, any more than it can say that G Dorian scale is “way more awesome” than C# Mixolydian.

Once you realize that, too, engineers don’t become any less useful. On the contrary, making something sound good really is an art, meaning you really do need that mixing engineer, that mastering engineer, that live sound engineer. (I sure as heck do.) And you need to spend some of your energy trying to learn more about sound, because it’s something that’s worth devoting a lifetime to understanding.

Software companies still need bullet points on marketing sheets; that’s fine. But as for the fact that sound doesn’t easily fit into bullet points? I think that’s a good thing.