Ambient, experimental, soundscapes, drones
Reviews
Curating a Live Event: Never Settle For Less Than Greatness
Mar 18th
By Steve Lawson - Following up my last post about recommending awesome things, I want to tie the same ideas into putting on events. The trigger for this was the Antwerp Looping Festival which I played last Saturday night. A bit of background – the ‘festival’ was one night, 6 artists, in a gorgeous little theatre venue in Antwerp, organised by one of the performers – Sjaak OvergaauwThe whole idea of a ‘looping festival’ or any other non-genre- or personality-specific festival is fraught with possible marketing pitfalls – if there’s no inherent style of music, or artistic/culturally-thematic link, how on earth do you make it work? What are people coming to, and why? Who are you going to market it to? If your target audience for such an event is other practitioners, it’s easy. People come to check out what’s happening, encourage each other, swap ideas, check out new toys and hang out. No problem, if it’s marketed as such. We’re far more forgiving when we see it as part of a community…If you’re putting on as a public facing concert, you need to apply the same criteria as any other gig: ‘Never Settle For Anything Less Than Greatness’. The music world is full of events that are booked by programmers desperate to fill a bill with anyone promising to bring 20 mates to the gig. London pubs are overflowing with REALLY bad acoustic nights, where talented people are buried under an avalanche of mediocrity, in a sub-open-mic-night environment, where the audience are in no way prepared to listen out for the awesome.
The problem with this for the event is that no-one is ever going to turn up unless they know one of the artists. And even then are unlikely to willingly stay and watch the other people that are on. Why on earth should they, if the likelihood is that the stuff that’s on is going to be #balls?
There are exceptions – both Tony Moore at the Bedford and Amity Hill who used to book the Big Secret night at the Ginglik curated a roster of at-the-very-least-rather-good singer/songwriters. I don’t think I ever heard anyone ‘bad’ at the Ginglik. Rarely at the Kashmir or Bedford. I regularly heard people who were actually brilliant. Often before they then broke big (I saw Seth Lakeman play at the Bedford a month or so before Kitty Jay broke out and was nominated for the Mercury. He was amazing. And I first heard Emily Baker, Dori Jackson and Alice Shaw at the Ginglik. Geniuses one and all.)
Both those venues are places that people go (or went) for ‘music’. Not to see their mate Dave play a few tunes, but to see *anything* with the expectation that it would be WAY better than staying in and watching TV.
That’s the job of putting on a gig. It’s what I did with the Recycle Collective, it’s what smart venue bookers do with regards to support acts, and it’s what Sjaak did for the Antwerp Looping Festival. The looping festival idea is a smile on a dog – it a hook to get people asking questions, but it doesn’t mean anything if the music doesn’t work without knowing it’s looping. Music that requires an essay of explanation for us to ‘get it’ works best in academia or trade shows. Public facing events don’t thrive on that kind of ‘subservient sound’ (music that serves a non-musical, technical purpose). So Sjaak put together an evening of really great performers. A lot of it was fairly dark ambient, experimental stuff. But the venue was comfortable, the lighting was lovely and the PA/soundman combo was pretty much perfect. So the audiophile geeks (of which there were many – two of the artists only had their music available on vinyl!) got a real treat, and the uninitiated got to hear some beautiful soundscapes in a deeply sympathetic setting, as well as being thrown a bone by getting to hear Louis Angelou – a singer/guitarist – and me, playing big tunes. And in my case, talking weird bollocks between songs.
The upshot? Near-unanimous praise, the acknowledgement that the bill was consistent, the event a success, and the distinct likelihood that pretty much everyone in attendance would be back next year, probably bringing friends.
The gig was great in an of itself, great for the artists (I got to hear 5 acts I’d never heard before, greatly enjoyed all of them and made a whole load of lovely new friends), but perhaps most importantly was good enough to spring board into new things, with the expectation in the audience’s mind that whatever Sjaak does next will be worth seeing. That doesn’t come by booking people who’ll bring a few mates. It doesn’t happen by putting on too many acts in the hope of making the posters look like loads is going on. It doesn’t happen by booking a crappy venue – if that’s the case, do it in your house and spend your venue budget on renting an awesome PA. It doesn’t happen by telling people that things are great that patently aren’t great. An artist being your mate is not a good enough reason to expect your audience to sit through their bogus set. Neither, sadly, is the thought they might offer you a gig where they live in return. By all means do gig swaps, but make sure that the reciprocal deal is based on a shared sense of awesomeness.
By all means give me a gig if you think what I do is fab. If you think your friends/audience/whoever will enjoy it, appreciate it and be grateful to you for finding me for them. But do it because that’s good, not because you think I might be able to get you a gig in London. If I think you’re amazing, I may well be able to get you a gig in London. But don’t make our friendship dependent on me watering down my reputation by telling people you’re amazing when I don’t think you are. I’ll book my awesome, you book your awesome, and more people will see more music in more great places and be more grateful for it. That’s good for everyone. For the Microgigs series that Lobelia and I are hosting, there’s nothing required of the artists other than their fabulousness. They may or may not like what I do as a musician. I don’t choose my friends or the musicians I listen to based how much they dig my wikkid bass skillz. That would be very weird indeed. So keep practicing. I’ll do the same. We’ll all keep chasing the awesome.
Steve Lawson,
March 15, 2010
Source: http://www.stevelawson.net/2010/03/curating-a-live-event-never-settle-for-less-than-greatness/
Time Stands Still
Jun 15th
By Michael Peters, June 15, 2009
Source: Veloopity blog
- European Live Looping Festival Antwerp ’09 – flyer
After a gig on an electronic music festival in a club in Cologne on May 9 (which went so-so for me partly because the sound sucked, I was not yet used to my new music software, and I was sick), my little European livelooping tour started with a gig in Antwerp, Belgium, hometown of Sjaak Overgaauw. Sjaak had visited the Cologne livelooping festival that I had organized in May 2008, and liked the concept so much that it didn’t take much to persuade him to organize a livelooping festival of his own. So a day before the festival, livelooping festival inventor and multiinstrumentalist Rick Walker and guitarist/singer Luis Angulo arrived here, coming from southern Germany. Before we went to my place, we had dinner in Cologne, meeting Julia Kotowski, a singer/songwriter/multiinstrumentalist/livelooper who was invited by Rick Walker to this year’s Y2K9 livelooping festival in Santa Cruz, CA. Rick was a little surprised at her young age meeting her in person on that evening, but we both agree that she has lots of talent and has developed a very interesting song style of her own which definitely deserves to be presented at the festival.
We spent some hours on the autobahn to Antwerp the next day (during a long hot stop in a traffic jam, Rick used the time to program his musicbox for the gig) and arrived in the afternoon at the Arenberg Schouwburg, a beautiful venue in the center of Antwerp. It was so great to meet old livelooping friends, and some new ones. Yes, the music is at the center of this, but the chance to spend time together with this very nice and creative bunch of people who I get to see only once in a couple of years is at least as important to me. I was especially happy to meet Os, Mike Bearpark, and Andrew Booker from Darkroom who I had the chance to play with in London in November 2007. And of course there was Fabio Anile from Rome, he had played on the Cologne festival in May 2008 and got inspired enough to organize a livelooping festival in Rome a week after Antwerp (more about this later). I also met Dirk Serries again, he had filled last year’s Cologne festival venue with his “Fear Falls Burning” drones and got to Antwerp to present his new “Microphonics” project.
Sjaak had done a perfect job organizing this festival. Venue, staff, technical things, food, everything was perfect. Thanks again Sjaak!!
This evening’s loop shows were very diverse as usual. This time I especially liked Luis Angulo’s vocal loops and his amazing Flamenco style guitar loops. Darkroom played a wonderful set that made me feel real good for some reason. I crawled around on the floor while they played, Os had given me his hitech camera and I had the job to take photos of the group which I gladly did.
In my own set, I tried to make use of quite a number of toys (such as Os’s wonderful XFadeLooper plugin), some of them new … and I improvised … so the result, as often before, was a collage like mix of different styles, and my own feeling afterwards was also mixed, although the audience seemed to mostly like it. I’m not sure where my creative impulse is leading me in my livelooping work. I hesitate to control it too much, so I try to let it find its own way. I wonder if it will eventually end up in some recognizable style, something that more experienced liveloopers like Markus Reuter or Robert Fripp or Dirk Serries or Rick Walker have developed. At this time, it is much more tempting for me to jump into completely different pools at every gig, sometimes even with sudden breaks, instead of trying to paint stylistically similar pictures every time. Rick told me that he loves the diversity of styles and sounds in my sets, and he thinks that the audience does too. We’ll see how it will work in Rome next week, and in Santa Cruz where I plan to perform in October.
Giant atoms and dark sets
Jun 4th
By Andrew Booker, June 5 2009
Source: Improvizone
Os, Mike and I took a trip across the Channel last weekend, to play on the Saturday night (30 May 2009) at the Arenbergschouwburg in Antwerp for Sjaak Overgaauw’s first European Live Looping Festival there. It was a really nice gig, and turned out to be a productive couple of days for me, yet still with plenty of time, in the words of Mr Bearpark, for some quality hanging about.
Since I was going to be spending half the weekend in the car, I made sure I got some time-lapse road movie material in. Having recently removed a load of fluff from the CPU heatsink and vacuumed its cooling fan, my laptop was back to working pretty flawlessly in the heat of the car, and I managed to get one frame every 0.9 seconds of pretty much all of my journey in Europe, and the return journey in England.
I left the UK early on Saturday morning and took the calculated risk of driving to Brussels before Antwerp. I wanted to take some video of the Atomium to use in Improvizone projections. From Calais, you get to Antwerp by taking the E40 and then turning east on the E17 (as I liked to think of it, the Walthamstow exit) at Gent. Or you can get to Brussels just by staying on the E40. The Atomium is conveniently located in the NW just inside the Brussels ring road, from which you can exit onto the A12 or the E19 and be 30 minutes from Antwerp. I figured if I got to the Walthamstow exit before 11:00, I would have enough time for a half hour stop at the Atomium and still make it to Antwerp by the expected 1pm. I got to the E17 at 10:54, and made it to the Atomium at about 11:35.
It was 50 years old last year, when I guess it was given the damn good clean it has clearly enjoyed since the last time I saw it about eight years ago. Now it looks literally brilliant, and to those with the taste, very beautiful. Sadly the ground level has been wrecked by a load of poxy exhibition tents and there is barely an aspect to it without visual clutter that is not obscured by trees. Anyway I dashed around and shot pictures for half an hour.
I then totally bolloxed up leaving the city. My one researched route was blocked by roadworks, I made it back to the ring road but missed the A12 to Antwerp, the only route I had researched to get me into the city and to the Arenbergschouwburg. I still had the E19, but did not reach it until 12:35 and had no idea where it was going to drop me in Antwerp. That took a few potentially lethal lightning examinations of my maps, and I made it to the Arenbergschouwburg at 13:00 on the nose. The final time-lapse frames prove it. I got there before Os and Mike, who had left England the day before and stayed in a friend’s house in Antwerp. I tried not to gloat.
Fast forward past setting up and waffle scoffage by the Darkroomies and Fabio Anile, to the gig itself. Each act took to the dimly lit stage and presented an individual application of looping for 25 minutes or so. Sjaak opened the gig with a really beautiful piano construction over asymmetric loops. I’m not sure if the loops weren’t really meant to be regular and metrical, but I thought they were intended, cleverly original, and worked really well. In fact at this point I was very glad I was not Sjaak. I could sit back and totally enjoy this music, without the responsibility of having to make it happen.
Sjaak was followed by Ufo Walter and Akim Triebsch. The duo played acoustic loop-rock by turns chaotic and groovy, always in perfect synchrony. Fabio Anile then took over the piano and peaked with a thundering minimalist piano piece where he played perfectly out of phase with his own complex loop for several minutes. Next at his little table of equipment was Michael Peters, whose set was part avant-garde noises and partly the harmonically elusive experimental fusion that I think he does best, especially this time in the shape of a rhythmic bass pulse where he’d massively reduced the sample resolution to a really dirty crunch, over which he layered some terrifically odd sustained chords. It was gripping, and I hummed with delight. By technical contrast, Luis Angulo made up the first, and better, half of his set entirely of vocal looping. It was pretty stunning to begin with, and took an unexpected turn for the even better when he started pitch shifting the loops. Brilliant. After Luis it was us, on which more in a moment.
Os and Mike
Guitarist Dirk Serries followed us with his Microphonics. We knew Dirk from his Fear Falls Burning appearances in Norwich and with No-man in Europe in October 2008. I much prefer his current set, the less intense Microphonics, gentler and clearer, and celebrating the timbre of the guitar rather than the force of distortion. Finally Rick Walker closed the gig with his wacky percussive looping of irregular fluorescent orange materials, only occasionally resorting to anything resembling conventional drum-like paraphernalia. As he grappled with technical problems it was possibly not the best night to witness the sheer depth of his inventive performance repertoire, but one lesson I immediately picked up flew directly in the face of my own approach to drumming. That has been to use electronics to create unusual and unnatural percussion sounds. Rick effortlessly achieves this using real objects in clever ways. Should I be trying an acoustic Improvizone evening…?
In terms of the Darkroom set, it’s possible that taking the prepared improvisation approach to a 25 minute slot like this was not the best strategy, especially breaking it up into three pieces. I reckon a Improvizone gig enjoys about 50% of the evening in a state of sustained exploration, which is when the really good stuff starts to happen in the music. Here, we only really entered the zone for a few fleeting moments a couple of times during the set. The rest of the time felt to me like I was just bashing stuff out. I am reminded yet again that, as I drummer, I really am a non-musician when it comes to playing satisfying regular organised music that resolves itself. What happens when I assign notes to the pads is that I keeping hitting them at the wrong time, wrecking the melody or the harmonic order, sounding exactly like someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Os recorded and videoed us as usual, and we were able to listen back later to what we’d done. After suspicious that we’d overstepped into the heavy dark side, in fact we were very pleased with how it sounded. I couldn’t hear Mike much during the set, but listening back to Os’s clean mix, he’s tearing along. Mean, sinister and fierce towards the end, yes, but all in a good way. You can watch and listen to the whole thing here. Os also has loads of stills on flickr here.
Darkroom go to Antwerp
May 25th
By Andrew Booker, May 29, 2009
Source: Improvizone
I’ve been getting ready for a trip to Antwerp this weekend for the European Live Looping Festival on Satuday 30 May 2009 (tomorrow) organised by Sjaak Overgaauw. Darkroom are playing, and Mike and Os left this morning. In order to join them on electronic drums, I’ll be getting up at the crack of dawn tomorrow and taking an early tunnel crossing to drive over, find the venue in a city I’ve never been to before, and remember to stay on the correct side of the road. It’s OK though, I checked the tyres last week.
Possibly on the way there, but probably on the way back, I hope to stop off on the outskirts of Brussels and do a bit of Improvizone backdrop filming of the Atomium. I know it’s a stationary object, and I’ve always wondered why people go on holiday with their video cameras and take moving pictures of things which are completely still. Movement is relative, of course, and now that I’ve been doing Improvizone visuals for about a year now, video is the way. So these days if I go anywhere, I always video as well. I like stills to look back through later on, and I like video to have my back to during a gig. By the way, that globe thing is in Seville, not Brussels. There are pictures of the Atomium everywhere, it’s 50 years old after all, or if you’ve not seen it, you could save the surprise until the next Improvizone gig, assuming I make the trip there this weekend.
Anyway, about the gig tomorrow, it’s a long lineup of loopers from all over the world. Suitably, the three of us are more prepared than ever. We spent about 10 minutes emailing each other about timings, tempos and keys, and I’ve worked out a few things to do, otherwise it’s improvisational business as usual for 25 minutes. I’ve done absolutely no work on my drum software since last week’s gig but I’ll be taking it anyway, plus the SPD-S pad by itself again, and playing a little bit of synth bass on it occasionally. Mike will be playing without a guitar amp, as he did at Improvizone last week, and Os will be using just the EWI and his laptop.
I’m pretty excited about doing this, and delighted Os and Mike have invited me. They have been known to fly to this kind of event with their gear in small cases. As a frequent attendee of scientific conferences, Mike informs us these international looping festivals are a very similar breed of event, which is why having two of us using our own software for sounds is a good thing. Were it not for that I would probably be leaving my backward and impotent drum software at home, seeing as it constitutes about one percent of my audio output. This is in complete contrast to Os, who has beautifully styled the last 18 months of Improvizone gigs using his own commercially available products. I figure if I don’t gig my bits and stuff, I’ll never have reason to develop it any further.
Now, where the hell is my passport.