Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Experiments with Synthesizers at Cat's Art MusikCircus

There were two shows last night but with a difference from the usual line-up.  Maestro Michi Renoir played the first set as he usually does but Deceptions Digital, a quite different type of synthesizer artist, played the second.   Usually Reis and Aldo play the second set but they often leave Italy for recording sessions in France.

Maestro Michi Renoir is, in my view, the reigning improvisational wizard in Second Life as I've never heard better in terms of the form of the music he plays and the colours he uses to play it.  How he does that when he's only using two keyboards remains a mystery as I've never seen his kit and he doesn't talk about it much.  There are some quite exotic forms of hardware looping he is doing as he highly adept at bringing different voices in and out of the flow it sounds like what he is doing is beyond the capability of the Boss RC50 (looper that I favour).

I can only guess at Michi's kit and it would serve no purpose to go any farther with it as nothing would be more than a guess.  What I do know is that he will start into a theme at the top of the set and he will frequently keep developing it through the course of the entire set.  Last night he played until two minutes before the end of the set, took a quick breath of air, and then launched into The Two-Minute Song to take it to the end.

He's an amazing musician and is my number one first choice for the person with whom I would like to jam if time and distance were no object.  The first reason for going to Germany is obviously to see Cat but the second is to jam with Michi Renoir.  Someday.


Comparing musicians is useless tomfoolery but it's necessary briefly because Deceptions Digital (DD) plays somewhat similarly to Michi Renoir but does it an entirely different way.  Where Michi is making it all up as he goes along, DD is doing fixed compositions.  The only point to this is that both produce extraordinary music but take very different paths to do it.

Someone suggested last night that DD is a DJ but that's not true as all of her work is original and she holds the copyright to the lot of it.  One can argue endlessly about the 'liveness' of something but in the end it usually comes to the idea that it would be a good idea if bicycles floated.  Sure, maybe it is a good idea but so what.  The only thing that matters is whether the music has the beat.

What I can tell you is that DD draws an enthusiastic crowd and quite a bit of it is because she definitely has the beat.  She will kick it all over the place and there are many words for it such as dub step, old school, etc, etc but most of them have come up because there are too many musicians out of work and making up words like that gives them something to do.  So I don't care about the words but I do care about the beat and DD's beat will make you want to shake it.


I don't have pictures yet again as I'm getting used to doing this again and will bring pictures in time.  I loved to close each review with a picture of Cat and I dancing and I would love to do that again.  We don't talk much during the shows as she does an enormous lot of work to support the shows and frivolous chit-chat helps that not at all.  But still we dance and listen and it's very, very good to be back.

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