So, I went to this Deadmau5 show…
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
Up until the day of the show, I wasn’t even really sure I was going to go. I liked Deadmau5’s music enough to own his full-lengths, and I knew of Skrillex from his remix work. But, you know, it was a Tuesday night, tickets weren’t especially cheap, and I wasn’t sure if I liked these guys enough to warrant deviating from my comfortable routine.
But I’m glad I did. It was sort of eye-opening.
I think I was probably the oldest person in the audience who wasn’t there as someone’s chaperone. It was heartening to see that good old electronic dance music is alive and well with the next generation, and that they’re just as ravy now as we were back in 91. Also, their fashion sense is as terrible now as ours was back then, and worse, those deplorable wookie boots I last saw in the UK in 2003 seem to have finally made their way into american youth fashion. Come on, kids, we made this mistakes so you don’t have to.
The crowd was totally into it from beginning to end. I got there a bit too late to catch much of Nick Nice’s set, but I’ve heard a number of his sets. I cringed when Dirty Disco Kidz came onstage with a lot of ghetto-speke. I cringed more when they opened with a rave-up involving “O Fortuna” - Carl Orff’s lawyers are not known for their mercy to even niche artists. The rest of their set was pretty good, though, and they were clever enough to play “Jump Around” which in Madison will never fail to get a crowd hyped.
Skrillex’s set was essentially an extended love letter to Ableton Live. The oh-so-very-young artist jumped about and headbanged onstage like he was thrashing out on guitar (which, if his wikipedia entry is correct, he actually used to do) when really what he was doing was tweaking a few parameters in Live to sweep filters or trigger BeatRepeat. Dude had a lot of energy.
Deadmau5 came one and…well, everything’s just a blur after that. Make no mistake, it was essentially a big DJ set of original material, cleverly tweaked and mashed up and so forth. What was truly stunning about it was the visual element. Okay, yeah, he’s got a shtick - the giant mouse helmet - and I have time and again harped on the fact that shticks don’t work. Well, his did. And only because it was just ludicrously well-done. I’ll get to that in a bit. His visuals were multi-layered, adding a lot of flexibility and interest to the stage. They were mostly abstract color fields, digital effects, circuit patterns, etc. but there were 4 individual layers of those - his giant “cube” podium was a series of screens, the light bars behind him were actually screens, the hanging strips behind that were also individual screens, and then the backdrop behind the stage was an enormous screen. And THEN halfway through the show, his mousehead mask also started functioning as a screen. Basically, it was every high-tech rave video/lighting system ever taken to the nth degree. Set to pounding electrohouse, and mixed with well-timed spotlights and varilight sweeps, it was a very, very effective mix.
Naturally, me being me, I did my best to analyze the show for my own purposes. My takeaways?
1) Unless you can do it on a pretty hefty scale like this, there’s no point to video and light shows. If the crowd has seen anything approaching this, they will not be impressed by a couple of pin spots.
2) Performance energy is EVERYTHING. None of these acts were doing much in the way of keyboard acrobatics or crazy soloistic virtuosity. And yet they managed to whip 4000 sullen teenagers (and a handful of middle-aged ex-club kids) into an absolute frenzy with stage energy.
3) I think there’s something to this whole “ducking the kick drum” thing.
4) I *really* need to learn more about my samplers.
5) The more dance-oriented shows I see, the more Ableton Live comes into play. I still feel that it’s not a great platform for producing more traditional pop records, but it’s pretty much THE thing if you want to do cutting-edge dance music.
So, for a few hours, for me, it was 1993 again, and I was dancing to techno with a big video screen in front of me. Oh, sure, the music was louder, the video projection system was much fancier, but the vibe was the same.