Post Mortem

I really want that title to be a blogging pun, but unfortunately I think it's too accurate to qualify.

Another sleepless night, another post. "They" say you shouldn't work in bed if you can't sleep, but "they" didn't seem to consider that just about every place that's not bed is colder and requires a great deal more clothing. Once the in-apartment jacuzzi arrives I'll likely be singing a different tune, but for now bed it is.

So the show on Saturday went alright. I decided to go way out on a limb and control the whole thing with the monome. The initial plan was to play the first couple of tracks freeform with MLR, then crank out the rest of the set in Live using MonoGrid (can't find a link right now, sorry), but due to last minute technical cold feet (Max/MSP and MiniAudicle wouldn't play nice in my dry run 10 minutes before heading to the venue) I nixed the MLR component at the last minute in favor of an all-Live set (pun not intended, for once). I'd spent pretty much every evening of the week leading up to the show preparing my big Live set for use with the monome: deciding which elements of each track were important enough to warrant dedicated buttons, setting up clips and follow actions, defining about 100k MIDI mappings (alright not quite that many) configuring effects, etc, etc. The end result of all this work was a set of seven tracks each haphazardly and inconsitently mapped to a monome "page." It turns out that when your songs average 30-50 tracks each in their "full" versions, it's a bit of work to cram it all into four-to-eight button groups on an 8x7 grid (eighth row dedicated to selecting pages for those keeping score).

In order to compensate for absolutely zero practice with my new configuration, I scribbled up a little map of each song indicating which sonic elements were mapped to which buttons. Unfortunately, come actual performance time (queue the atmospheric lighting) my map became completely invisible, and so I just had to wing it. This coupled with a whole new (and equally bizarre) glitch in which my "pads" track kept randomly starting and stopping led to a fairly stressful but ultimately not terrible (I hope) performance. It was a great learning experience though- a couple of things I'll certainly make time for in the next go around are:

• Forcing mappings to be consistent between songs. It's hard when the instrumentation of each track is so different, but it's becoming more and more clear to me that in order to become proficient at this new way of performing I really need to be able to know that particular locations on the grid correspond with particular song components (e.g. beats, etc) without having to refer to a piece of paper.
• Practice. I simply didn't have time for it this show, but with greater control comes greater responsibility, and practice is going to be essential from this point forward. Who would have a thought: an electronic musician practicing! I think we're on to something.

Michael was kind enough to bring his camera (though there weren't any good places to put it and it was hot in there and I was unattractively sweating like a dog) but there should at least be a solid audio recording of the set that I may or may not post depending on how bad it ends up being =). As always, though, it was a good experience, and I think I'm growing with each show, though my ambitiousness might be outstripping my experience at this point. You know, back when live performance was but an abstract possibility I figured I'd come out of the gates fully-formed and guns blazing, ready to amaze the world with my prowess and stunning professionalism; the reality has been much more humbling. But it's a good fight, and I'm slowly inching towards more compelling ideas and greater skill- it just might be a while.

Until then...