As announced earlier, last friday I had my first real solo-performance with material that matters to me.

It took place at an exhibition opening of my friend Lilli. The thought behind the performance was to try to convey the atmosphere of her book “Todkehlchen”. In my way of interpreting it, it is a silently drawn book about death, loneliness and friendship. About wood, flesh and beauty.

Performance-wise I am quite satisfied with the result. I really did not have much time to prepare and rehearse, so what you hear is the first time I ever played this set in this form. So to say, some kind of prepared improvisation (excluding this one part, that is obviously triggered clips). Feel free to download and share, feedback is always appreciated!

Thanks to Lilli for having me and to all friends who came. You made it a memorable evening!

Now, everything would be fine at this point – but without me knowing, at the same day a college of mine died at the age of 27. He just finished his studies, married this year and had a little son. Although I knew him just for about a month, I really liked him a lot.

When I read the message the next day, it seemed ironic, having played a performance around the topic of death the day before. (“Todkehlchen” translates to little death-throat; a pun on the german name for the readbreast bird)  While I can’t change what happened, I still want to dedicate this recording to you, Julian, rest in peace my friend!

Thanks, @ktfall for the nice picture!

But why? Why didn’t I manage to put my musical ideas (which I guess are still there and vital) into actual pieces you can listen to?

Last weekend it became clear, that it was form. In the days of playing in bands everything was quite fixed. The band setup consisted of drums, bass, two guitars and vocals. I was one guitarist with some songwriting-responsibilities. Time I spent for the band was either practicing guitar, writing songs or riffs and attending rehearsals. Note: 100% of that time is directly connected to music. 100% of my ideas were direct musical ideas.

Now switching to music done with the computer. Just adding this device into your music makes everything a lot more complicated. You have to question everything that was kind of pre-set in your band. What kind of music do you want to do? What is your sound? How do you perform this music? Adding to that, computer is technology. And technology needs to be adapted to your needs. So you have to learn about programs, underlying principles and interaction-patterns.  These topics are all barriers in your way of developing musical ideas.
And this is the reason I look back on not too much output. I did not find answers that satisfied me. So I looked further. More energy and time was consumed dealing with stuff surrounding music than focussing on actual music.

Hopefully this will change now. I finally found a setup that fits my needs. A first version of a setup, that is Ableton-centered but not screen-centric. Actually I can turn off the screen and put the laptop aside.
It makes use of  all of the MIDI-equipment I have now (M-Audio Keyboard, NanoKontrol, PadKontrol, Nocturn and FCB1010) and is all about looping both external input and sounds I collected. It uses multiple instances of Ableton Looper, a self-hacked Step-Sequencer for the PadKontrol and some instrument racks. One for key-sounds, the other for collected sounds.
I guess I will do some sort of video tutorial round-trip of the setup when time is right.

The most important thing, though: I finally found answers to all conceptual question and solutions to all technical problems. I now know, that I can spend my time again thinking about music, not about technology. And when I have enough pieces done, I can now easily perform them.

So stay tuned…