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Monday, June 18, 2012
AVICII - MAKING OF THE SILHOUETTES VIDEO
Avicii maybe a complete sellout but he still manages to stay creative in certain outlets. His team made the music video interesting Silhouettes and the twist in this video is certainly unexpected.
The Age Of The EDM Rockstar
(djtechtools) The age of the EDM rockstars is here – now where are the rockstars? Festivals are atracting record-breaking crowds that cue up to watch their heros perform “live” but all too often this simply means pre-rcorded mixes and fist pumping while everyone sings along together to their favorite song. Are the fans really getting their money’s worth? Do they even want more?
As we prepare to enter the second half of 2012, I find myself reflecting on the commonly held idea that music occurs in cycles of twenty-year increments. Almost exactly 20 years ago in 1992, new bands like Pearl Jam, Rage Against The Machine, Nirvana and many others burst onto the stage, filling stadiums and attracting huge audiences. They certainly weren’t playing the same style of music, but I do find some similarities between the sounds of Rage Against The Machine and the heavy sounds of bass music today. Many people have said it’s the metal of our time and if you look at anyone with their “bass face” on, it’s not hard to see why.
Extreme "bass face", lower left. (Photo Credit: Jackie A, EPR)
With the popularity of EDM exploding, we now have massive electronic music festivals occurring all over the world at a un-precedented level. Here in America, from Coachella to Ultra Music Festival, fans gather in the hundreds of thousands and DJs hold the spotlight backed up by cutting-edge light shows, stage structures and even pyrotechnics. While the entire affair looks similar to large festival shows in the past, I can’t help but notice one glaring omission.
Where is the the rockstar performance?
While most of us never had the opportunity to actually be in the crowd at a Rage Against The Machine or Nirvana concert in the early ninties, fortunately there is some pretty epic footage available on the web. Check out this video from YouTube where RATM absolutely destroy their hit single, “Killing In The Name Of.”
Every time I watch that video—or even think about it—it never fails to give me those trademark shivers that are a great sign of something really good happening. I don’t know if it’s the power of the crowd, or just how connected to their music every member of the band is, but there’s something about that performance and the potency of authentic rockstars onstage that make it really, really, memorable.
Now contrast that with the same equivalent today. Here’s a recent performance of Skrillex at Ultra Music Festival earlier this year:
In that video, the focus of the onstage performance is the DJ booth, designed like a giant spaceship that is supposed to go up and down. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking on Skrillex - the songs he produces are intricate, very well produced, and really, really, catchy. It’s no surprise that Sonny recently won three Grammys for his hard work in the studio.
Steve Aoki certainly tries to be a rock star; he gets out onstage, sprays everybody with champagne, jumps into the audience for a crowd surf, throws perfectly good cake around with wild abandon (see below), and generally fills his show with rockstar-like antics.
So we’ve got big names, big stages, big lights, and big shows… What’s missing?
THE FEEDBACK LOOP
Sample jockey Girl Talk: one of the modern kings of rockstar DJ performance (Photo credit: J Caldwell)
We recently conducted a interview with Armin Van Buuren (coming soon!) and he puts it best:
Great DJs never play the same set twice, they listen and respond to the crowd as the night progresses (…) To me it’s the small resident DJs that do the best work since they engage in this activity night after night for hours (…) It’s a much harder job than playing a big festival.
Really playing with the crowd is the key power and responsibility of a DJ, which can easily start to disintegrate on big stages. Most modern EDM stars play the same songs, in the same order, in every set, at every festival – “Levels Syndrome”, as our staff has started to call it.
The Levels Syndrome: Hearing the EXACT same version of a song at various tents and stages all day long. Most notably Avicii’s “Levels” in the last year.
Sure big bands of the past also had set lists, but each time the band improvised in a unique way that was fed by the energy of the crowd. The fans pick up this improvisation and respond more, which causes each instrument to play harder – producing a feedback cycle of powerful proportions. I would argue that this experience of really playing “live” to a crowd is essential if EDM wants to have a long life in the spotlight.
The good news is that we are getting close. DJs now use equipment significantly more creativity live, but most are still far from becoming true instrumentalists of their music. We readily admit, the perfect recipe for an amazing performance may come down to personal taste. Not everyone wants to see someone likeAraabMuzik bang out every note, but I am confident there exists a healthy balance of playing live and sequencing that will create a memorable experience for both audiences and performers.*
* A notable DJ that did this effectively in the past was Z-Trip with just two turntables and a microphone
IN YOUR HANDS
It’s now up to you, the next generation of EDM superstars, to show us old guys a road to the future. I don’t quite know what it looks like, but I sure know how it should feel: Amazing….
Pendulum Breaks Up...Pursues Knife Party
(stony roads) "This morning on Triple J lead member Rob Swire of drum and bass band Pendulum revealed they will no longer be producing or playing live shows under the moniker and will instead be focusing on the new project Knife Party.
“I guess we’d been doing Pendulum for ten years and that’s a pretty long time to be doing anything I guess. We were still playing tracks like ‘Blood Sugar’ that we made when we were 18 or 19. To still be doing that 10 years later, it just felt like time to do something else.
I don’t know if we’ve outgrown it because it just evolved into something else in the end. But it was time for something new and the music scene itself had changed. Rock bands are having a pretty hard time at the moment and we weren’t a rock band but with Pendulum we had the band format. We just decided that in 2012 it was time to put that down for a bit.”
Speaking rather candidly Swire renounced the original format of the band and referenced it as ‘junior school’ in comparison to the success of the new electro-step sound.
“The Knife Party thing is going so well we don’t really feel like going back to junior school anytime soon. We’re having too much fun with this project. It’s also great because Pendulum towards the end sort of felt like we were doing it because we had to and that’s never a fun way to do music. Whereas Knife Party is pretty much solely us doing what we want to and if no one likes it we don’t care.”
One half of us is sad to see a project like Pendulum bite the dust but another is satisfied that they’re willing to completely cut the ties and not pursue the act just-because."
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