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live acts / a rant by son kite
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| Philby |
do you ever wonder when you go see a "live act" how live it is?? i've seen BT twice perform a 'laptop symphony' which was basically him fiddling around with ableton or whatever, and despite having keyboards and other equipment lying around he didn't touch them. the first time i saw him the power cut out and he played the piano, but that's it. i've seen other psy trance acts that have tables full of equipment but basically don't do anything. it almost makes me feel robbed...i've seen faithless live, and it was an amazing experience, also a sort of techno-style band that i can't remember the name of i saw earlier this year in april, the same thing. does it make a difference to you? i would rather see someone use their sequencer or laptop if that is whats advertised, but when i see the words 'live act' i think i expect a bit more.
which brings me to the next point, the latest newsletter from Son Kite. they have a bit of a rant about recent touring experiences regarding bad organisers and also 'fake' live acts. i've only seen snippets from their live dvd but it actually seems live, i mean one of the guys is playing a violin. how many 'live acts' in dance music actually perform instruments live? like i said with BT, wouldn't it be much more exciting going off to flaming june or something while he is actually playing it there on the keyboard in front of you? does it mean anything more? to me it would definitely add to the experience. what do you guys think?
ps
here is the excert from the son kite newsletter i mentioned:
We mostly try to talk about the good side of things, especially in the newsletters, but this spring have been packed with negative tour experiences and we feel that we have to share some of that with you. If you get bored just skip reading!
When we get a booking we always send a technical rider/contract to the organizer that he/she have to confirm/sign. In the technical rider you get all the information about what we need to be able to make our performance and since we bring around 100 kilo equipment ourselves the organizer don't need to arrange much. Just to make sure that we will get everything we need our manager always calls three times to the organizer to make sure that they have arranged everything we need. Important to add is that we don't ask for things just for fun: EVERY thing we ask for is used in our live set and if we don't get it we can't perform. To us this sounds very easy and logic, doesn't it?
Here comes a short story/example of how it can be when you're touring and end up with an unprofessional organizer. This story is from the Souleclipse festival in Turkey, they made all the mistakes an organizer can do! Please note that they are not the only ones doing mistakes but this was just hilarious!!!
We took the flight from Sweden to Turkey 6.30 in the morning (just to make sure that we got to the festival in good time) and arrived at the festival in turkey late afternoon and there where nobody to pick us up at the airport. got picked up a few hours later (because some juicy champignons were going to get picked up), arrived at the festival area around 01.00. We where supposed to play around 8.00 in the morning so there was a lot of time to prepare the liveset. We thought!! Went to the stage and tried to find someone in charge. We couldn't find anyone so we had to do all the stage management by our self, until our dear friend and angel Sally Dollally came and saved us. (Without her help there wouldn't have been a live set from us). From 01.00 to 08.00 the three of us were working our asses of just to get hold of the equipment we need to be able to play, but after scanning the festival site for hours we couldn't get the stuff we needed and had to find out new ways with the things they had (12 hours before that the organizer made a personal promise that he had ALL the equipment in front of him and that he personally would show it to us when we arrived (we never saw him!!!))
So finally we have enough equipment to play with, but where? Before our gig was four "live acts" in a row, all just using a laptop playing a stereofile! When someone is playing you can't connect four meters of equipment (on a two meter table) since you then would have to disconnect the stuff he's playing with (even thou it's just a computer thru a 48 channel mixer and even thou it would sound exactly the same if he just pressed play on the cd player). This is the reason why you ALWAYS should have one dj in between two liveacts. To be able to play we had to build a new table behind the other one and do you think we got any help (except from Sally of course)? Anyway we managed to get everything ready 3 minutes before our timeslot, this means 7 hours of non stop stage-managing, stage building and equipment hunting, all well wrapped in frustration and irritation! How much motivation do you think we had to play? How much energy to do you think we had for smiling, improvising and to get into the music?
Different people are responsible for different things, also when you're making a party. The only thing an artist should be responsible for is performing, at his/her absolute best, the party organization should work at its best to create the best circumstance for the artists to perform and for the audience to enjoy the performance that is the point with having a concert or a music festival. People that love our music paid a lot of money to see us in Turkey and because of a organization we couldnˇ¦t do a good job, we are very sorry for this but we hope that people understand the reason. As I said before this organization is absolutely not the only one that don't know what a technical rider is, at least half the time we play we have to make weird solution to be able to play. If you're an organizer you should know your work and take it serious since you have a responsibility towards artists and most of all; your customers.
BUT we believe that the problem is much more complex than this and there is an explanation why organizers don't pay so much attention to our technical rider. There are hundreds of live acts in the trance scene, playing all around the world and earning good money and you could probably count the ones actually playing live on one hand! Playback live set in the trance scene is as accepted as djs playing with cd players, people even get surprised when you actually play live! how sick isn't that??? If you get booked and paid for playing live you should play live, if you don't have the equipment or the knowledge to be able to play you shouldn't accept the booking! If you're interested to play live, develop your way to play and let the world know when you're ready. We totally disrespect all the fake artists playing around the world (almost every trance artist) and we hope that YOU, the customers that in the end pay the money to the artists, claim your obvious right to enjoy live performances when this is what they write on the flyer! You should print t-shirts with the slogan "FFLA" fu** fake live artists! and if you come to a party and find an artist not playing live, go to the door and claim back your money!!! In this way the organizers will start to claim a non playback live set when they book an artist and hopefully this would force the lazy m****fu**** to work for their money. |
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| Fearless One |
| even if you do only some minor on apleton it's ubercool to call it live act :o |
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| idoru |
| quote: | Originally posted by Philby
i've seen other psy trance acts that have tables full of equipment but basically don't do anything. |
You don't know about hardware synths and MIDI too well, do you? |
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| humilis |
| Most of acts prerecord them, playback them and look like they're turning knobs live on the stage. |
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| DJ Mikey Mike |
Some of the Live Acts i've seen in my time have made me ing CRINGE - Push, Nu-NRG, Green Martian, Riccardo Ferri, Second Sun, etc.
It's actually embarrassing to watch people dancing and thinking that these jokers are doing anything more than pressing play on a laptop and then tweaking knobs. It's disgusting.
Not all are though. Underworld, Orbital, Hybrid, etc. are amazing to see live.  |
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| Philby |
| quote: | Originally posted by idoru
You don't know about hardware synths and MIDI too well, do you? |
no not really
you mean something like that? you connect it to a midi keyboard? doesn't that still let you actually 'play' your tune live? instead of just pressing a button or knob meaning 'play this acid line' and standing back watching. |
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| RebeL9 |
Son Kite ing rules ^^
nice article btw. Good to hear some criticism against the fakers. |
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| Philby |
| do you get the newsletter rebel9? did you download that track..? ;) |
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| RebeL9 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Philby
do you get the newsletter rebel9? did you download that track..? ;) |
The Ticon one? :stongue: |
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| RickyM |
Sonkite are awesome...I heard a set of there's from Japan, was out of this world...I think they might have played the violin in that one.
The Shiloh remix of focus is brilliant too... |
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| THE_Chris |
Yeah Son Kite are one of the few 'true' live acts out there, who actually make an effort when performing.
Very underrated too. |
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| humilis |
Look at this:
http://www.plurall.org/fotos/thumbnails.php?album=48
What a "live".. Cubase SX playing stereo files and they look like they're working hard.
Rinneradio is one of the best Finnish true live EDM acts. They use some hardware, Ableton Live, saxophone and live percussion. |
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