Defining and re-imagining performance with computers and technology is an ongoing theme of this site. In a special guest column, artist Primus Luta goes deeper into that question with some of our favorite artists to look at practical and philosophical dimensions of playing electronics.

Today, the fruits of electronic musical labor can be heard in every corner of culture, from academic to niche to popular. Still, there remains a perceptual disconnect between traditional and electronic music, especially in the context of performance. With traditional instruments, performance proficiency can be measured as a physical accomplishment. Electronic performance, on the other hand, is generally understood as music made by computers. That poses a question: if the music is being made by the machines, what exactly does the musician do? To find out, I talked with some of the best electronic performers on the road, and got a glimpse of what exactly is going on behind the screen.

Live Rig: Mark de Clive-Lowe

From the Studio to the Stage

Historically, performance long preceded recorded music. Early recordings weren’t what we think of today as studio productions, but rather recordings of performances. Electronic music is a bit of an anomaly. While some early electronic compositions were created for live performance, most electronic music today begins with a recording.

As a companion to Primus Luta’s story on artists and live electronic music performance, we’ve compiled a gallery of videos of the artists featured in action live.

Daedelus

Hardware is wonderful, but make no mistake about it: many musicians have put the same care and musical love into their software setup as once was limited to tangled guitar pedal rigs. We’ve been watching as intricate computer music studios appear in the CDM Flickr pool.

proem, the gifted electronic musician from Austin, Texas (see Wikipedia, proem’s own site) who regular shares haiku-like reflections in CDM comments, is the latest to post his setup:

• Dual Dell e207 LCD displays
• Windows PC
• FL Studio (aka Fruity Loops), with a custom dashboard for controlling all the hardware and a modded install
• Native Instruments Komplete
• Evolution MK249-c keyboard (Evolution was a UK-based keyboard maker later absorbed by M-Audio)
• M-Audio Trigger Finger
• Wacom Intuos3 6×8 (just picked up the same tablet myself and adore it — mouse, begone!)
• The now-discontinued (sadly) Fingerworks iGesture multi-touch controller. Apple iGuesture any time soon, perhaps? (I’ve heard rumors from a couple of sources that they bought the patents.)
• The not-discontinued Shuttle XPress
• Tablet2MIDI, which translates Wacom graphics tablets to MIDI data for use in performance

DIY music can be as much about attitude as specific gear. We had performances Friday and Saturday night during the Maker Faire, and while the performances covered quite a gamut, a common theme was finding new ways of playing old instruments, or to make new instruments out of existing stuff. That’s something not unique to anyone genre — electronic music included — so perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising at all.

Friday night was a Maker Faire “edition” of the regular Robotspeak Sessions electronic music night. The venue is an incredibly cool little electronic music store on lower Haight. Imagine a dream store filled with both vintage gear and the newest stuff, and you’ve got Robotspeak; it’s unreal. Saturday night was the Maker Faire “Chips + Music + Fish after party”, which I planned with the help of Make Magazine’s Paul Spinrad. It turned out to be just as insane as I thought trying to run an event in the middle of Maker Faire, but we had some terrific artists. (And yes, the fish and chips turned out to be the greasiest thing I’ve ever eaten, but tasty!) The venue was a wonderfully quirky place called Edinburgh Castle, and the best part of the evening for me was that we ran into one of the members of a great band called Echodrone that happened to have a projector. He was playing vintage training films on electricity, which we got to watch run behind Barney’s massive home-built Theremin. (See above.)

I don’t believe music should be about gear (surprising as that may be given the site I run), but I do believe you can tell a lot just by looking at the tools musicians choose. Here’s an overview of the artists we encountered.

If I can do it, you can do it. Over on the just-launched Create Digital Motion, I describe assembling a custom PC from a barebones Shuttle case, with photos of each step. To keep that from getting boring, I dropped it all into the fantastic plasq app Comic Life to make it into a how-to comic:

Building a Portable SFF PC for Live Visuals, Music Gigs: Part 1, Assembly in Comic Book Form

As you’ll see, there’s not much to it. Shuttle already includes the motherboard and cables; it’s BYO processor, storage, and graphics. But those options alone can give you a lot of flexibility you don’t get from pre-built systems.

We’ve talked a lot about options for gigging with computers on this site. Laptops remain the most portable alternative by far, of course, and they’ve gotten very powerful. As I noted for Macworld, the MacBook Pro can keep pace with even my dual-2.5GHz G5. So why have I suddenly shifted gears and built a desktop form factor PC? One major reason is the ability to have an upgradeable video card for gigs, which is why the story is on CDMotion rather than here. Sure, Apple will ship a competent ATI Radeon Mobility X1600, but you have to splurge on the Pro rather than the MacBook, there’s only one card with one output, and it’s not upgradeable.

Video aside, there are plenty of reasons mainstream audio users might consider a desktop form factor machine for music production: