From the upcoming album, “Earth, Vol.3” this is a live performance that reinvents the original track in a new light. Taking what was once originally an ambient style electronic piece has now been reinvented into two parts. The first being a performance using traditional instruments in an acoustic setting, the second being a garage/house style live performance using resampling from the previous part.

Research + Initial development

The initial idea for the performance began when writing the original version of the song for my album. I was inspired by “i might say something stupid (remix) feat. The 1975 & Jon Hopkins” by Charli XCX. The instrumentation of the track was fascinating to me, using traditional elements like a piano and adding in electronic elements and manipulating the original recordings to create glitch textures that are spread through out the recording. I also loved how the use of air made the track feel very intimate, and that was something I wanted to recreate in my track. How the track ended was also a note wanted to hit, having this swell of electronic elements and drums creating a rise in tension before a drop that never happens.

For the second part of the performance, I wanted to create a track utilising samples from the first part and perform it all live in one take. In order to do this, I needed a way to play, record and play back elements seamlessly without pausing, I landed on using the Ableton push II to perform the entirety of this piece. This dictated a lot of how my performance. My original idea was to take a singular bounce of the whole track and resample that, like you would see in classic Dj-ing. However, this caused issues within the sampler, as a lot of the splices ended up being too short to be unusable, some were also outside of the range of the Push II. I combatted this by bouncing out the first part as stems, this allowed for more accurate sampling and also was a more creative method as I build each element up individually.

The over arching theme for the song isolation. I really wanted to get this message across in my performance and wanted to demonstrate it in how the performance is shot. To achieve this, I decided to shoot everything in the dark, having my only lighting be from computer screens. Underneath the whole performance I have a video of me playing Minecraft, the concept behind this is that in the video I am playing with friends online and communicating with them, but from an outside perspective, you can only hear my voice which highlights the feeling of isolation being experienced. Even when talking to people, you are still alone. I didn’t have a tripod or a proper camera. I filmed the performance with an iphone, balancing against a headboard with multiple pillows and blankets, without a viewfinder, it became a lot of going back and forth to see if I had the shot correct before I started performing. The guitar performance are not being recorded as I did them earlier in the day so I could see the fret board clearer. I recorded the vocals live.

After I had finished the performance, I imported the stems into my original logic session. To transition between the two, I created a large reverb tail from the end of the first part and made it rise in pitch until it met the key of the second part. Some of the live automations I did during the performance didn’t quite translate them the way I wanted to, so I decided to use latch automation in logic.

After I had written and recorded the original version of the track, I had to conceptualise how it could be presented as a live performance. Original ideas of the performance resembled something akin to Jacob Collier’s style of performance, which is to have all the instruments miced up in the same room and build the track using live looping. I thought this would work well as a performance because the track naturally lends itself to the format, being built up multiple layers of loops. However, I decided against it because there were too many logistical issues to resolve within the time frame I wanted to do this performance in such as:

• How would the live looping actually work? Would I have to acquire a looping station or manipulate a DAW in a way to record on separate tracks without stopping playback?

• How would cameras + lighting be used in this? The space I would have would very limited as it is with microphones and cables all over the place, how would I fit one (or more) cameras in the space and still have enough room to walk around.

• I still wanted to use electronic elements in this performance, how would that be achievable? If I was using software instruments, how would I swap between them while recording?

The original track is also over 7 minutes long, after I had done the original recording of each part, it doesn’t really change, so I feel the performative aspect of this aspect would be lost with this track

After playing with the idea some more, I decided to have what I wanted to do contained into one performance had too many variables and points of failure, so I decided to split into two performances, which I will dub as the acoustic and electronic performances. The Acoustic performance being remaking the first verse and chorus of the track with traditional instruments using only live takes, no over dubbing. The goal of this performance wasn’t to record every instrument in one sitting, but for the performance to have an improvisational feel to it, I didn’t record to a click and just let the instruments fall in and out of time.

The electronic performance would be taking the recordings of the acoustic performance and creating a new track in a new genre using live resampling, and having the whole process be recorded live and improvisational. In terms of what track I would make, I have always wanted to try making a house/garage track and saw this as an opportunity to experiment with that, I looked to tracks like “Yeah I know” and “I Think There’s Something You Should Know” by The 1975 for inspiration, which are tracks in the genre but with artists I’m familiar with.

Prototyping + Developments

The first part of my performance is a instrumentation of the original track, I wanted to utilise real instruments and try to recreate a live feel with the recordings. I decided to track without a click and to improvise all the live takes. I recorded electric guitar, acoustic guitar, vocals and piano. For the electric guitar, I recorded direct to DI and used a virtual amp sim. For acoustic guitar, i used a slate digital ML- 1 pointed at the 12th fret, I used the same mic for the vocals. And for the piano, I used a pair octava MK-012 mics pointed directed at the hammers to create a closed and intimate feeling.

I wanted the final performance to be filmed in the dark with my only lighting being from a computer screen, to make sure I was making good quality and accurate takes, I decided to do the actual recording in the daylight rather than in the darkness

After further experimentation, I was able to create a live session that was prepared for the final performance. I created stems of each individual element of the first part and found a way to transpose them up 4 semitones using one of the global settings in simpler, creating a more glitch-like texture. I also wanted to add drums to this part of the performance so I created my own drum rack using a mixture of inbuilt samples from Ableton and my own samples cut from 60’s and 70’s tracks, because of the drum rack I was also able to store multiple different “kits” on the same instrument channel, allowing me to completely change the sound of the track with needing a different channel.

The Performance

The second part of the performance required a two camera set up. I used my phone to record my face to record myself as I performed and I used my computer webcam to record the Ableton Push II. The quality of the webcam is not the best, but I felt that it helped cement the certain aesthetic I was going for. I also screen recorded my ableton session as I was performing