Wednesday, February 18, 2015

DD and Michi Bring Electronical to Cat's Art MusikCircus

The intriguing thing for me with Synth Night at Cat's Art MusikCircus is that Deceptions Digital and Michi Renoir are electronic synth musicians ... but ... they work the craft in opposite ways ... yet both get to the place of Transcendent Tripfulness and that's got to be good, right.




Deceptions Digital uses Ableton Push and Ableton Live to compose her pieces offline and then presents the result in her shows.  Some will quickly judge and then scream DJ but DD writes all her music and DJs never do.  Nevertheless, it's irrelevant as the charge only means the reviewer didn't understand her art.

Ableton Live is very much about MIDI triggers and this is when you do some action and that triggers an event via MIDI.  The event may be your brilliant arpeggio, thunderous drums, or even lights.  The key is you work out these sequences of triggers and they collectively make music happen.  When DD gives a performance, she makes herself one of the triggers and instead of a MIDI event triggering a note, in performance a MIDI event triggers the whole song.  Thus DD isn't a DJ for the music, she IS the music.

Please feel free to break off into separate groups to review 'what is really live' ... and please don't bother reporting back.  You know it's live when you hear it.  If you don't know it then it wasn't live even if someone was playing it in front of you.

DD's music has been evolving while I've listened as, frankly, the early work could go either way with me.  Her tunes were mostly short, high-impact tunes with a heavy house beat.  I've got to be in the right set for that as it works out easily at the disco when you're twenty and have a snootful of XTC ... but I'm not twenty and haven't used XTC in some years.  In truth it hasn't been that many years but still it's not likely I will appear at a disco any time soon.

There is a strong house influence in DD's work but she is stretching out her songs in reaching for a much more transcendent experience of them.  Where most of her songs were around three minutes when I first started listening, it's not uncommon for them to go out ten or more now.  It feels very much that she composes for the entire show rather than individual components within it and the result is electronic but still surreal.

Music is DD's dark secret as none of her friends know she does it.  So, if you know any of DD's friends, don't tell them.  It's a secret.  I'm not mocking her as I did this too and I suspect a good many others have done it at as well.

By the way, don't memorize her set list as you can be guaranteed it won't be the same for the next show.  DD is constantly making new music.  She has immense passion for it and that's part of the liveness.


Michi Renoir approaches his music in the opposite way as he doesn't formally compose anything.  For him the biggest magic is in improvising everything he does and that may get you thinking of jazz but it's not any traditional form you ever heard before.


Right away, maybe you forget about a music review and go, oy, what's this with the naked bimbo on the stage.  I really don't know as Michi said she was 'his friend' but she's not a real naked bimbo; somebody built her.  And, technically, she's not naked as she is wearing a few tiny bits of something.

Michi Renoir doesn't play anything that would get you thinking, man, this music needs some naked bimbos on dance poles.  It's a novel situation as the naked bimbo is a simulacrum but so are all the avatars in SL anyway so the bimbo is a simulacrum of a simulacrum and that's a whole world of weird you can try to understand on your own time.  I'm not sure of the punchline on this as there's got to be some inside joke happening here and I'm sure Michi and his girlfriend will be discussing.  Good luck with that conversation, cowboy.

The transcendent aspect of the music is the beauty and the tragedy of what Michi does and it's the same for DD as well because many people don't understand.  The problem isn't so much that they're using difficult time signatures or playing in unorthodox keys as this isn't bebop, that's a different world of musical alienation as people don't get that too much either.  To appreciate any of these musical forms requires patience as you won't get that pop song payoff in three minutes.  This is music for which you kick back and let it unfold in front of you.  It's not so much an enormous complexity as in symphony, for example, but rather it's an appreciation of the changes.

For some while, Michi was playing a soft ethereal segment and that may carry you to a place of fairies, water lilies, and Monet smiling ... but ... then he works it around so the music has a distinctly Oriental flavor.  As you listen, there's the wonder on, man, how did you get there but it flows beautifully and that's the magic.

Try something different once in a while as there's comfort in that pop music because it won't surprise you.  In some ways that's transcendent as well as the surprises in the news aren't so good.  Maybe the surprise is more terrorists, the GMO cabbages that will poison us all, or the sunspot cycle we now realize will turn us all into toadstools.  Just now, people don't like surprises very much.  However, the surprises at Cat's Art MusikCircus are of a vastly different nature and there's certainly nothing to fear in them.


Some repairmen came out to fix the telephone system near Cat's home yesterday and the immediate consequence of that was, yep, Internet is down again.  That wasn't such a good surprise but everything was good as new for show time and here she is:


Kim Kardashian thinks she has a nice backside ... but ... only in yer dreams, girly.  When she skinnies down to a backside like this one ... then ... she can say she has a nice backside.

No, I will not have any naked bimbos on the stage when I do my next show.  Maestro Michi, what were you thinking, my friend!

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