I was recently thinking about of one of my favorite live sets I’ve played as a solo artist. This was a time I played at a local dive bar on a Friday night. It was around 2009 or 2010. I had made friends with the person who handled the booking of shows at this bar by being a regular that was respectful of the staff and tipped appropriately. It’s funny what being a decent, kind human gets you in this world. We got to chatting about music and I told them about what I did. They thought it was cool and that I should play there sometime. Eventually we landed on a date where I could open a night at the bar. They typically booked rock bands of sorts to play there, especially on the weekend nights, but they were down with giving me the space to do my weirdo electronic stuff.

I had some time to create something. I had some songs that I could do with my midi controllers and my laptop. But, most of my stuff at that time was prearranged and pretty set. There wasn’t much of a live element that I could do. It would be more like a dj set than anything which I wasn’t exactly interested in at the time. I needed something else to make more of a show for folks that wouldn’t be me hitting play. I wanted there to be more.

As I thought on it I got the idea that doing something that involved those watching could be fun and considering the venue it would be pretty easy to do. There wasn’t a stage at this place. It was pretty small. When they did shows they would push the pool table in the back up against a wall and bands would set up. So, any crowd that would be there would be right there with me and getting them involved seemed easy. 

What I came up with was a sort of mix of a relatively traditional and simple DJ set and something that one might find in a museum. I made a set up with my mixer where I plugged in my laptop on one channel and on another I plugged in my record player. I picked a handful of records to play in the show and set up a collection of different synth sounds on my laptop that could be triggered by my midi controller. The songs were all ones where they were the first track on the vinyl record. I didn’t want to be fiddling around with finding the track on the record during the show. This made it kind of fun to find tracks I wanted in my record collection at the time that fit this criteria. A couple that I remember were “Only a Lad” by Oingo Boingo (it’s track one on side 2) and “We Don’t Need Another Hero” by Tina Turner from the Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome soundtrack that I had a single of.

This was my first attempt at doing something interactive and improvised as a show and I was really excited about it. I made a collection of sounds across various tracks in Reason. I set it in my midi controller to be able to move between tracks of which one was enabled at the time, so that I could flip between sounds without using the laptop trackpad. The sounds were a bunch of different things that ranged from sounding like laser beams to distorted slowed down and reversed samples of a person talking. Whatever I could create that wasn’t melodic or harmonious sounding in the slightest. Just whatever I could come up with to be the complete polar opposite of the polished pop songs I had picked out from my records.

What I landed on doing was opening with playing a song on my record player and at different points in the track I would start to play the selected sound. With this I would mess around with the volume faders of the sound or the song playing. I would fade in the sound over the song slowly or I would switch them both back and for the suddenly to swap between the two or just flip it completely over the sound and mash on the keys to make wild shit happen. I had different effects set up in reason to engage and disengage on a whim like distortion and delay. None of this was synced up with the song playing in any way, so it was random and dissonant and generally set up to confuse people and make them feel pretty uncomfortable.

So, that’s what I did. I started the first song and played my random noise over it. As I went back to the song and let it play I encouraged people to join in and have people come up one at a time to play the keyboard and make their own weird sounds happen. A bunch of my friends came and even a few people from work. The rest of the crowd was the usual Friday night folks who came to hang out and drink. My friends all thought it was weird, but silly and they saw how much fun I was having and they joined in. When someone would play the sounds at a point I would use that time to flip it over to the next record and bring that in. I did this for about 5 or 6 songs and ended my set. My favorite part was in “We Don’t Need Another Hero” there was a point that the chorus was about to come back in and I jumped up in the air and slammed my feet on the ground right next to my table. This made the record needle jump, creating a drop of silence, and it came back down right at the top of the chorus with Tina Turner’s beautiful voice coming. Side note, that song fucking rules.

I had a ton of fun playing the show. It was silly. It was random. It just really spoke to me and I had a great time. Some folks watching the show joined in and had fun along with me. Most of the strangers there that night did not enjoy it. It wasn’t the usual loud, rock band they were used to and expecting and it was too avant-garde for their tastes. Most folks went outside to smoke and waited for me to be done. My favorite part of this was after I was done and I went up to the bar to cash in one of my two free drink tickets I had someone walk up to me and if I really considered what I just did to be music. They were very confused as to why I would do what I just did. I told them that in fact, yes I did consider that to be music. They didn’t have much of a response after that and I grabbed my drink to go back to hanging out with my friends.

This kind of fun and improvisation is something I hope to bring to future live gigs, but maybe at more of a show where folks coming are expecting weirdo, experimental stuff. I don’t feel like confusing the audience exactly. I want them in on the fun or at least willing to ride along.