[microsound] Re: microsound Digest 13 May 2004 12:55:09 -0000 Issue 1174

[Matt Davignon <mattdavignon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>holzkopf <holzkopf_head@xxxxxxxxx> done wrote:
>
>buy a nice stereo and stay at home and listen.  it 
>will sound better and save you a lot in ticket and 
>travel prices for shows.  

Well, yes, that's often my solution


>Greg Headley <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> gone and said:

>This is an interesting take. Do you mean that you 
>prefer improvisation over composition? 

For live shows, yes. I enjoy them the most when they
have some degree of improvisation in them. When they
don't, I'm often silently cheering when the musicians
make mistakes. 

>One could extend this line of thought and get to "I 
>don't like going to the symphony because the players 
>are just precisely replicating the notes on the 
>pages in front of them". 

Actually, a symphony can't really be accurately
reproduced on a cd. Not as 2-channel audio coming out
of loudspeakers. I do feel that way about several rock
bands, especially when the shows are attempts to
reproduce the cd, only suffering from the lack of
production and engineering. 

>Aaron Ximm done wrote: 
>
>Some of the best sound "performance" I've ever been 
>to was Francisco Lopez
>basically playing subtley EQed field recordings.  If 
>he only tweaks a few EQs and cross fades a few 
>tracks, but the experience is mesmerizing and
>the sound intense, does it matter that the work was 
>making the recordings and composing a piece from
them?

Francisco Lopez performs in carefully-selected spaces
with very specific demands for the PA system. Like a
symphony, cd's don't really do his live shows justice.



>then Greg Headley <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> was all:
>
>There was a Fennesz piece in the Wire a year or so 
>ago (why does it always come back to Fennesz?) where 
>he compared people and their Max/MSP patches to the 
>guitar shredders of the 1980s. 

I've been hearing a certain amount of sameness in
musicians who use max/msp, which isn't too different
from the sameness I hear in many guitarists. Both are
extremely versatile tools, but the standard musicians
seem to all go in the same direction. With guitar,
it's "ooh! distortion & power cords!" With MAX, it's
"ooh! granular synthesis/microlooping!" Of course, I'm
not saying "all guitarists" or "all laptoppers", but I
do notice a normalizing trend on instruments that seem
to have limitless possibilities. 



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