Forest Drive West texted DB1 and me, if we were be up for playing a long live show and that we might get a secret stage at Draaimolen festival. Haven’t played live for a couple of years after Rural, Atonal and Monom, all with Ena in 2016 - 2018, I was blank. But I wanted to do it, and started to get my head around the live thing again. Without a show or the equipment in mind, I said yes.
Before I were able to think about the actual music to perform, I had to approach it analytically. A long live performance, including collaborative jams needed special preparation. I needed careful selected stems from Ableton sessions, to cover newest releases, unreleased and experimental projects, getting together enough material to go for hours potentially. But I didn’t “just” want to be firing loop trigs. I wanted it to have a real improvised live feeling, real modular patches and live beat programming to be mixed with stems. And it should fit in a small bag.
Next my stems (I didn’t use half of them) in the sampler module by Bitbox, I prepared a few sequencer channels to control a VCO for sub bass, a synth voice, kicks, percs etc, but left most programming open to be programmed live. In the end, I did a solo performance for about an hour, going deep into dub techno and minimalistic drum and bass vibes, followed by a 4, yes FOUR, hours of fully improvised, pure machine jam by Forest Drive West, DB1 and me (as Levl).
Want to get the inventory and my notes on every module in the setup, and how I used them? Hit the subscribe button!
