----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Martin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Bleep43" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Thorin Teague" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, February 09, 2004 10:55 PM Subject: Re: (313) final scratch (fwd)
> Ableton on the other hand has made non-DJs like Brenden Gillan into really > enjoyable DJs and really good DJs like Surgeon into friggin megamix > deities. Yarr! > however- i've not seen surgeon actually play with ableton. is it just him > and a laptop? o ris he still playing records along with the ableton loops? I've seen him four times in the past year now. At ATP he played a Final Scratch set, and it was fantastically varied. I think also because it was sort of his UK Final Scratch coming out party (or was it the 2nd time???), it was all that more mind-blowing for the unexpectedness of it. I saw him twice this Autumn, once @Werk @ Plastic People playing (I think) a combination of Final Scratch and Ableton. He had two laptops at any rate, so it's hard to say if he was using the 2nd laptop for effects or what. That was probably the most eclectic set he's played of these four. It was also fantastic. A couple of months later he played Split, and that was an all-Ableton set. It was probably the most straight-ahead of all of these sets, but it was also his first time playing an HDJ set at a larger party in London to a younger audience (well, younger than Plastic People anyway), and I think he may have played it a bit safer with the track selection, in terms of not pulling out the madness quite as much as in these other sets. I'm not sure if his set Saturday was just Ableton or not. I think it probably was b/c a friend of mine made the snide comment 'you know he's not DJing, right'? It really didn't matter if he wasn't. It was seriously mind-blowing, probably the equal of his ATP set. I think the Autechre track count was at around 4? And you really wouldn't have known it to look at the dancefloor. I was most surprised by the fact that he worked things in the mix for what seemed like 4 or 5 minutes at a time, with Autechre on top, and the whole dancefloor seemed to love it! In fact, I'd say one of the songs that got the worst reception was Badger Bite! That really threw me for a loop. ;) I'm not convinced it's the solution to tired DJing just yet, but I think that in the right hands it can be magical, and in the almost-right hands it can enable an escape from genre constraints. I've always loved to play as many different styles as I can work into a beat matched format, so if Ableton helps DJs feel like they can do that better, then I'm perfectly happy with it! If Surgeon hasn't been the best techno DJ on the planet for the last year, then his equal hasn't visited London recently. Tristan ======= http://www.phonopsia.co.uk [EMAIL PROTECTED]
