AGF was doing live vocals, of course; that was
cool, and Sue Costabile her live visuals. Hellothisisalex
was playing oldskool sequencer style, so the beats and
bars were all set up but the organ washes etc were
live -- which counts as "live" for me in electronic
music.
But as Ben notes, not many people in the _laptop_
world have moved on. All of the exciting things this
year happened outside of the laptop. Ben was the only
person I saw, perhaps beside Chris Sattinger, who was
using his own Max patch which called for live variation
and manipulation of sound -- he had his screen projected
all big at Metropolis, so people could see exactly
that. OH -- I am forgetting someone -- Alexandre Burton,
who created live Max patches totally on the fly from
an initial sample, all projected on screens so we could
see. It was wild; then his machine crashed, and that
was it ... that was quite cool.