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View Full Version : Dj Spooky and Pan Sonic at Rome 20.10.2004


videoteque
21st October 2004, 12:32 PM
Yesterday I saw Dj Spooky and Pan Sonic (http://www.romaeuropa.net/English/festival/schede_compagnie2004/10pansonic.htm) in a the wonderful Auditorium in Rome, Italy.
ys
I was aware the Auditorium is a great place, but yesterday I went for the first time. How great great architechture is.............:nod: :nod: :nod:

Dj Spooky acted alone, remixed "Birth of a Nation (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0004972/) " by Griffith. From what I understood (all coincidence with reality is fortuitous) the original 1915 film is pretty racist. Instead Spooky changed the titles (it's a silent film) to make it the opposite. I didn't understand very much the sense of the film since the titles first were in italian, then in english and anyway a lot of times too little for my eyes to read...

There were three screens, the central being bigger. The lateral ones showing the same. The visuals were pretty repetitive, consisting basically in changing the (sub)titles, the order of the scenes and layering some electronic schemes over the images.

The music was better, even if at some moments I felt little relation to the movie/images.

All in all it was a little too long, but had good moments (mainly in war scenes).

The thing that bothered me was that before starting the set, Dj Spooky said "Don't forget everything is done live" and all the people who saw it thought the opposite, all was canned. He changed volumes, delays and scratched some musical passages.


Pan Sonic instead surprised me a lot at the begining. They used only the big central screen, in which they projected an osciloscope image of the sound. The background was gray and the line black. It was good to understand what they were doing to the sound...

The sound was LOUD, noisy but minimalistic. If someone described me the show I would never be atracted. But feeling that brutal noise, and see how the couple of guys on the stage modulated to their will it was great.

The structure basically was, they started a beat (simple and efective) and they started to distor/add noise on it until they arrived to a big chaos, at this point they started again with another beat. The first two or three times I was really impressed and the audience too (they shouted!!!). All in all I loved their simplicity and precision. I missed some variation of the structure...

LEVLHED
21st October 2004, 04:47 PM
I've been a fan of Pan Sonic for some time..love that shit...they used to call them selves Panasonic but that didn't last too long.
thanks for the report! any idea how DJ Spooky was playing/manipulating video?

murk
21st October 2004, 04:55 PM
Originally posted by LEVLHED
any idea how DJ Spooky was playing/manipulating video?

Quicktime player on a Powerpook on OS X, each video track loops 2 or three times, then it gets changed.

CA
21st October 2004, 05:22 PM
I heard him being interviewed on NPR about this show. I dont know about in Europe, but he said he was getting a lot of mixed reactions to the visuals of Klansmen. It didn"t sound like bad reactions just maybe a little shocked. People just didn't really expect to see a really nasty chunk of American history in a club.

It cool that there is more media coverage on a VJ/DJ event like this, all though I think that they were mostly covering the story due to the content of the video. But every little bit helps.

videoteque
22nd October 2004, 12:42 PM
LEVLHED, Pan Sonic was great. The more I think about the more I like it. I don't think anybody can make noise BETTER than them... :scared: :scared: :scared:

What I loved about their show it's that they seemed to control the ""sound"" in anyway they liked. I don't know what they used (they were far from me, maybe 200feet, 60meters). I loved it was minimalistic too. The visuals just an osciloscope. Great but noisy!!!!!

Instead Spooky said this ultra stupid comment that "everything is done live" which is absolutely false. Even AC/DC has turned the knobs of ther Marshall amps before the show!!! In any case after this afirmation I spected much more "live" feel.

I don't think visually he used Quicktime, since the music was synced and I suppose multitrack. Can you make a .Mov file with 8 tracks???

The sound was mixed, delayed and effected live, but I don't know with what. I was at the same 200feet... :)

I think he could have used a Kaoss Pad, does it permit scratching??

In any case, for people doing this kind of experiments, it was nice to see so many people (+1000!!!), in a wonderful place (the Rome auditorium is a music mega complex, with three big halls). It was a pity there wasn't a screen showing what the performers were doing........

holly
22nd October 2004, 03:18 PM
Originally posted by videoteque
I don't think visually he used Quicktime, since the music was synced and I suppose multitrack. Can you make a .Mov file with 8 tracks???

The sound was mixed, delayed and effected live, but I don't know with what. I was at the same 200feet... :)

I think he could have used a Kaoss Pad, does it permit scratching??
Spooky has a bit of a reputation in NYC circles. He is definitely connected to some sponsorship like Sony, but his technical (and dare I say social) skills have been the subject of gossip and ridicule. To announce everything is "totally live" when it obviously isn't is so lame but typical. I hate art that has to be explained to be appreciated.... The audience knows when something feels live or canned. If things actually ARE live but you are coming off like clockwork with no sweat, the audience will still assume everything is pre-recorded. AVJ performances need to be a little more like a circus act where you show the audience a little failure and unsteadiness at first even though you do the balancing act every day.... It's like hearing the orchestra tune-up before the opera. It get's people emotionally hooked.

Kaos Pad is so easy to use for scratching it should be in everyone's toolkit. It's a great little fx box and in 4 years when they are all over ebay they will be a steal. It is probably the easiest way to apply live fx, and the way it lights up you know exactly how "live" each tap is!

QuickTime is a container. It can use any number of video, audio, text, and midi tracks up to the point your computer chokes.... Controlling all those tracks on the other hand, is a completely different story.

I saw Pan*sonic a few years back and they used a small screen with a b&w cube oscillating to the noisiness. I think the only change they made was halfway thru they made the image negative. Wooooo. But it was so encredible and low-fi and simple and really added another dimension to the music without altering the minimalism in any way. In fact it made the rhythmless parts much cooler and easier to sit through.

Nice review!
:heart:

syzygy
22nd October 2004, 04:15 PM
AVJ performances need to be a little more like a circus act where you show the audience a little failure and unsteadiness at first even though you do the balancing act every day.... It's like hearing the orchestra tune-up before the opera. It get's people emotionally hooked.


Most insightful comment I've seen in a long time.

This has got me thinking about our live show. We have made huge progress in getting everything really tightly integrated and synced. We're doing things using midi sequencing that just would not be possible manually, but maybe we now need to take a step in the other direction and introduce a little more chaos...

Dan.