A new Cabeza de Vaca show already at Scanner FM!!! This
week a short interview backstage of BeCool with Scott Monteith aka Deadbeat and
Danuel Tate aka Danuel Tate. The focus on the interview is on playing live and
a little at the end on being Canadian since the rest of the show is some newish
Canadian music and also the show was to celebrate the new Micro Mutek line-up
which is partially announced. More details can be found at the Official Mutek Site.
Click here
for a partial transcript of the interview.
Some points
of discussion arose from several things that appeared on Resident Advisor
recently. Scott mentions the Blawan interview and was aghast in particular at the
following answer from Blawan:
“Q: You
made the move from using a laptop at first on this project, then on to a
completely analogue set-up, right? Why? What is the appeal?
A: We were
so frustrated by the writing process on a computer, I think I was coming to the
limits of what I could do with a computer because I felt like, not in a
big-headed way, but that I knew the software that I was using, Ableton, well
enough that I could do anything. I didn't really like that.”
I also
mention a few comments from the recent Critics Round Table podcast with guest Kirk Degiorgio who mentions something that Scott interprets
to be Alexkid’s Insta-Haus a Max for Ableton device while one of the other
journalists enthuses over the recent set of Bass Clef at The Wire Magazine’s
recent Rewired night at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
There are
several contradictions here, rightly pointed out by Scottt and Danuel all to do
with the technology fetish. Bass Clef plays without a computer and it is
credited as amazing when many groups made electronic music for many years with
no computers. Similarly, Blawan’s comments come across as somewhat extreme too,
ditching the computer for lack of creative potential when it is likely that it
is his use of the computer that has become static. However, the other side of
this is that the analogue machines these people use are essentially “stupid
computers” as Scott says. So what is the difference? Alexkid shows here how his
Insta-Haus set up for Ableton works and indeed it seems quite a simple set-up
but one could easily find limiting creativity at a certain point.
However, it
may be that Kirk Degiorgio was also talking about something like this Vintage House Construction Kit
which has helped all the Rush Hour et al. artists to sound the way they do. I am
most definitely not familiar enough with the technology to know its limitations
and how it really works, but having thought more about it in the interview, it
does seem true that the man vs machine debate is far from over, but it nonetheless
has been a hot topic in 2012 especially after Deadmau5’s comments earlier in
the year in Rolling Stone about pressing play.
Scott and
Danuel also talk about the Pure Data (PD) visual
programming language developed by Miller Puckette for making music.
Peter
Brinkmann has also been credited with bringing PD to Android devices that I
also do not fully understand, but it is perhaps these kind of things that Scott
was saying that Mathias Aguayo was using?
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