Klang 30

 So I received an offer from Walter of Klanggalerie to go to Vienna to take part in a two-day mini festival he was organising to celebrate 30 years of Klang. After some hesitation - this would after all be only my second solo live outing I said yes. 

Not being a regular live act, there were the usual doubts about what exactly to play but after much experimenting I settled on a selection of recent instrumental tracks all of which could be performed/generated on the spot without recourse to backing tracks. I would primarily be using the laptop as taking a whole analogue set-up to Austria would have been impractical. Watching a bloke hunched over and squinting at a laptop screen is never going to be that sexy and so there was the temptation to slap together some sort of accompanying video, but having seen too many wallpaper video backdrops one knows that these just add a kind of distraction unless there has been a real co-ordination/relationship between sound and image. So it would be just me then I recalled a little patch I had made that allowed one to switch between presets using a computer keyboard. Effectively every single key can be allocated to a variation and one has 50 plus keys to cut between adding a certain performative and visual what have you especially on rhythmic tracks. 

On the two-day bill were quite a few notable souls from the avant/noise scene though many like myself - Philip Sanderson (from Storm Bugs) were performing as solo iterations of their perhaps better known bands. A few minor technical difficulties on day one aside all went well and there was a healthy and appreciative crowd. I was first on on the Saturday and was a little worried that nobody would have arrived by 7.30, but the place was pretty much full and the set went down well with a appreciative comments being made after. Here are three videos taken on the night the sound is presumably recorded via the cameras microphone so isn't hi-fi but heh you get a good sense of the occasion.