Sunday Synth Jam: This video captures a set of improvisations by Matt Davignon, using a solo drum machine, with no effects.
Davignon is best known for his music for drum machines, usually augmented by live looping and effects. In this video, he plays just the machine.
Recorded live at San Francisco’s Luggage Store Gallery, where there’s an experimental music concert every Thursday night.
Here’s what Davignon has to say about the performance:
I usually play drum machine with a bunch of fx pedals to get unusual sounds. For this set, I only used the drum machine itself.
The second improvisation (starting at 5:52) involved starting with a kit where all the pads have the exact same sound, and tuning it as I go.
The last improvisation (starting at 22:40) involves starting with a default TR-808 kit.
via RibosomeMatt
Poisson d’avril?
This is so good!
Interesting seeing a luggage store post, I have played there a bunch, great place run by great people
That was totally unexpected and amazing!
Waouh, a random push button jam….
He could have the same result by sitting on it.
is this cool? yes. does it sound good (musical)? no.
Sounds exactly like when you accidentially put an audioclip into a miditrack in Ableton and then it gernerates a weird drumrack and midiclip out of that. Or if I let my little nephew randomly hammer around on the Push. I guess you have to be some sort of famous dude to get people applaud to you for THAT kind of performance. I almost feel trolled, but nowadays I guess that’s called great art.
Noise
Gotta admit this is one of those things that I can’t tell if it shows some supreme higher knowledge of the machine or…well, the exact opposite?
Like when I had to study atonal music, the piece my professor chose for me sounded terrible, and while I could analyze it on paper and understand why the notes and rhythms went in that order, when I played it I couldn’t understand why the composer decided following the rules of that system was a good idea.
Maybe too meta for me.
limited tools rules ~ how’s that for the spirit of freedom and punk! i’d enjoy watching a set like that!
Ha! I was there that night! Pretty inspiring performance
Think you need a new tag for the site: “GAS Killer”. Great work.