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Hello friends,

I am back to blog... and this time it's all about music and live performance. Whenever I talk to producers, musicians or DJs there always one important issue: live sets.
Playing a live set in any kind of genre means a lot of preparation. When I remember my band times with The Government Jazz Sister, The Diary of Thoughts Project etc. it was a classic band context. Every single member played a role: an instrument.
So we practice, everyone on his or her own at home, to stay fit and improve our skills. When we met together to rehearse our songs, we played them until perfection. We developed an intuition for improvised parts in jam sessions, to foresee how we would react to each other.

When I started producing electronic music, suddenly everything was different. When I composed my music, it was mainly arranged by the cursor on the screen, tons of automations were drawn, millions of mouse clicks performed. Imagining performing with a mouse as a controller... hilarious.
Well... I was much younger. It was around 2007, and I had no f***ing clue, what's going on when I saw electronic musicians performing on stage. I watched videos of Apex Twin and Autechre, standing behind mysterious cubical devices (rigs) and laptops, showing almost no motion. And I thought: what the heck? The music is so powerful and the sound is so huge. Why are they behaving like autistic, shy, little nerds. Simply because they were, and maybe? still are.

When I began to study electroacoustic music in 2010, the mist around the mysterious live performance began to thin out. Enlightenment.
Lately I was remembering me as the young newbie and I was looking at the knowledge I gained in the last 10 years, and I thought: THAT's WORTH SHARING IT!

Whenever I'm discovering a new electronic artist, I'm analyzing how he or she might perform her music live. And everybody is doing it slightly different.
It's time to shed some light on the possibilities out there. Because performing on stage is a very important moment for the artist. It's that moment when he meets his audience and needs to deliver an exciting and convincing show. The feeling the music contains needs to translate across the speakers, and create a believable world.

I will post every Sunday about one artist that inspired on how to perform my own music live. And it can be quite mind bending. :-) So feel free to get some free skills and take whatever you need from my experience. I hope we can create an exciting exchange.

Random thought of today: Rolling Stones is just another name for Rock and Roll.

Yours,
Ben Haviour

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