Thursday, June 16, 2011

Performing Live: Tim Exile

Tim Exile has been pushing the state-of-the-art in live electronic music performance for years now. His approach- developed and honed over as long a period- relies heavily on looping and manipulating his own voice, a technique that gives him a huge amount of control over tone, timbre, and rhythm in real time, and without any need to muck with synthesis settings. Here he is giving a brief overview of his setup:



If this feels like Beatboxing++, it is. Now just imagine the magic that could result from pairing these tools with the vocal skills of a professional-level mouthist (my brilliant term, btw):



This approach- creating a well-defined workflow and a fixed set of well-practiced tools, then relying almost entirely on improvisation to construct both the structure AND the content of a performance- feels like the holy grail of live electronic music to me. This is the true intersection of virtuosic musicianship and technical acumen. As usual, I can't wait to see what he does next.

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