a few tangents

a bunch of videos to watch in your spare time, hopefully giving some ideas. blake and i went and saw tuneyards on friday night which was, in and of itself, pretty incredible. more on that a bit later. but we talked through some ideas a bit. one of the things i was telling him about was the following clips, taken from ableton live's website. it's the band caribou, showing how they use ableton live in concert. i quite like the idea of each person in the group having access to ableton live, and it kind of functioning as a communal brain that everyone is able to manipulate in some way. don't worry too much about the technical aspects if they go over your head, other than to say we wouldn't need to add too much to our gear to be able to function in this type of manner.

the first clip is an explanation, the second is just a live perfromace where you can see them actually doing it...





another thing we discussed was the idea of limiting the actual instruments we use in order to create a cohesive sound across an album. i was listening to lcd soundsystem last week and realising that he/they alaways use the same sounds, same drum sounds, drum machine sounds, synth sounds, guitar etc, but push those around in the arrangements, so that it's cohesive yet still has a diversity. tuneyards did a similar thing - just drums, bass, ukelele, 2 saxes and voice - but used incredible arrangements (and incredibly funky grooves) to keep it interesting. here's an example...



we actually have the man and woman power to do this kind of thing without even needing to rely so much on layering loops. and the sax playing was pretty inspirational - cherry. :) blake also brought up the idea, which i like greatly, of untethering us from a reliance on the laptop driving the music but rather, us play things and the laptop serves us (through looping, processing etc) which fits in with the ideas from the caribou stuff above.

none of which actually helps in determining what these new sounds will actually be, but possibly all being in a room together playing while we are in the making it up phase might be a good option - or, at least, actually writing songs first and then arranging/producing them, rather than the other way around which is generally how we function at the moment.