Defs makes sense to me.
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I think I get it now… my coolest festival was one where all people danced not in front of / to the DJ and watch him/her making those „hot-knob“-moves …but there was a HUGE KuKa robot arm that looked like a robot ant from another dimension and when turned 180° like a transformer …
This was the most immersive weekend in my life! So I guess you are totally right.
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Amazing! I’m all for a spectacle (spelling? looks wrong). But as a painfully shy individual with an even shyer female singer that also loves creating abstract or nostalgic visuals for our videos, we might benefit from being a bit more allusive, behind the scenes and essentially saying screw regular gigs and festival appearances. It would be perfect for us nice to play intimate shows for 50-100 people at a time very rarely and try to create an atmospheric, immersive experience instead.
the problem is not being shy … this was a festival with hundreds of wood/mixed media artists + musicians 
so the problem is more: How can you create art that is immersive and can be done by you and your band + helpers. Look at @William_WiLD‘s thread how an immersive show is being planned. Lots of work!
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Link? Sounds interesting!
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Nice one! I’m going to devour this thread before bedtime. Cheers for the suggestion 
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Here I did the opposite. I recorded a slow 2 minute guitar jam into the Blackbox (DN for chorus and reverb/USB Audio) and made a video of me just hitting the pad as a one shot. Nothing else… 
I like some performance aspects on YouTube. Feels weird just watching a single box playback audio…
For science
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not for me. I watched Four tet dissecting Love Cry in pro tools about 15 times. It just inspires me and gives me motivation to see how it was done and that he‘s only cooking with water as well.
I would go crazy if I could see Aphex performing an Analord track on Roland gear.
I was overly excited when you could see him (from a bad angle) jamming on a 909 and 303 on one of his dj sets. Just increases my curiosity and admiration actually watching them doing their thing. For non musicians that are not into hardware etc this might all look very boring anyway
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I read a few comments here now that suggest performing electronic music live equates flipping a few switches and pressing play with the other hand in one’s pocket…
I think it comes down to what “perform” and “live” means to your band -
Playing back fully automated tracks…that’s playback not performance, and certainly not live performance… (maybe “live playback” lol). I think for a knowing crowd, that sort of stuff can be a bit distracting, especially if the artist pretends that it is NOT just live playback.
Then there are artists like eg Ilyich that use sequencers & predetermined midi arrangements but tweak sounds & synths in real-time and spontaneously - this sort of stuff can already be a lot more engaging for the crowd / viewers, because there’s an element of spontaneity in there that is tied to the moment in which the music emerges…so in a way the viewer gets to participate in the moment of inspiration (plus in the case of Ilyich, he’s a sick bass player on top of that lol).
Finally there are true LIVE performance, in the sense that the music is created in that very moment. This can be scripted music performed live (similar to a band) or this can be entirely spontaneous music that emerges from the moment completely (I’m thinking The Bays etc). The latter especially I find super exciting to watch and see visual cues that indicate a vibe or burst of inspiration leading to a specific musical decision…plus, it is often technically interesting to watch such performances happen.
I feel that music and visuals can go hand in hand an enhance one another. This is true for music creation (eg our sound engineer of choice at JRS Studio here in Berlin tends to pick out visually interesting YouTube videos and play them back on loop muted to help artists “catch a vibe” when they write and record music at the studio) as well as music consumption (I hate that word in this context).
All that said, pre Covid we organised live events where we’d have the venue go completely dark for a performance while people lay down on the floor…stuff like that. I feel if it is purposeful (and not meant to just “hide” the performer or performance) such sensory deprivation can be an enhancing element to the experience in its own right…but I wouldn’t think of it as the “absence of a visual element” rather as a particular type of visual experience (ie darkness).
Long post, interesting question lol
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I read there’s a bit of a debate on what is a Live Performance. And i understand : there’s a lot of expectations and subjectivity.
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For some a “Live” is musician playing their own music (meaning it’s not a record reproduced in real time but it can have recorded parts played as loop or textures or sample in a drum trigger, triggered by the drummer in his/her setup)
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For some a “Live” should be equally good as the album version, if not they must do go seeing the band anytime soon and they choose which artist they will spend a ticket to see them “Live” based on that.
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For some a “Live” is something more than reproducing “Live” an album, like playing songs differently (different intro, part longer than the original, guests coming to play with the band as a featuring, playing unknown track, unknown version…)
(we are already in expectations) -
For some a “Live” is creating Music on the Fly, things that not existing before to be on stage. We may relate this to “Improvising” like we know it in Jazz music.
see how the level of expectation go higher and higher and i didn’t even introduce the associated notion of visuals, art performance, lights & more.
Plus (+), for some people Visuals is decorative and they don’t really care, they like it as scenography and overall ambiance. It’s an add-on to the lights. it’s for sure an incredible added value to the show.
Interesting thread here… as @PekeDorty said i created a thread to explaining my current project. from the mind thinking - to looking for references (but i do art-school so i had art history courses so i had courses on art performances : so many crazy things there)
my approaches on music, visuals, story telling and scenography. My commitment to this project is i’m graphic designer and musician, i usually heard complain like people saying (by the past) oh i’m bored with all these graphic designer, dj… like if someone does more than one thing, the result will be not good enough or worst those people are pretentious.
I don’t care. I was pushed by evolution of the scene to djing, then organize my events, create my label records, get a network… yeah at some point you can do it all or you’ll have to get a team - so to paid also a team… we are not equal on that. Time and Money dealing with is very difficult.
I had some health issue, my level of expectation career wise is lower than when i have 20 years old. i have graphic skills and music skills, my goal is to blend them and to express myself. My project is based on that.
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if you put OP-1 jams on youtube you a basicly admit u will never have a classic album its simple maths
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I think you touched on the duality of this matter in the original post.
I think it can go both ways. There are those times when you get the “I can’t believe that person did that on a Volca” and sometimes the thin veneer of mystique is ripped off.
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?? 
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First there has to be some ‘mystique’ to ruin.
So if I don’t already know the music, then really, watching some live thing on youtube ruins nothing. Putting your live sets on youtube ruins nothing. ( Unless you’ve got millions of albums sales and fans and are really cool)
Lets say I do know the music, and always pondered ’ how do they do that?’ And then I see the youtube clip, the mystique might be ruined, might not. Depends what they are doing, and how they are doing it.
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Made my day! 
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Robert Henke wrote two really great articles ob that topic, and I really agree on so many levels on what he says…
https://roberthenke.com/interviews/supercomputing.html
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Sorry for spamming, but this (very controversial) article by Simon Reynolds is also a good read on the matter of our expectations:
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That sounds amazing! Exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for. Sensory Deprivation Shows
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Should this COVID thing pass and should you ever be in Berlin, I’ll happily invite you to one of these sessions. They are modelled after psychedelic ceremonies / rituals - lots to be learned from the great shamanic traditions of this world 
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