Electronic music’s histrionics

Last Thursday, I saw a show with Caribou and Fuck Buttons. Caribou is the stage name of Dan Snaith, a psychedelic musician from Canada, who records solo but tours with a live band. Fuck Buttons is a noise and drone duo from England. Seeing these two bands share a bill highlighted the fact that electronic and live music translate into performance in very different ways.

When a musician plays a dynamic, physical instrument, the movements that he makes directly create a sound. A guitarist, held into a certain position by the instrument and forced to use a pick in one hand, will naturally accentuate the movement that sets the strings vibrating. But the computer programmer, who simply (in the live context) presses a button to create a wall of sound, isn’t physically linked to the production of sound in the same way. In short, a good portion of the work that goes into creating electronic music happens behind the scenes. The product, and all the designed sounds, are endlessly interesting, but the process doesn’t have any meaningful live analogy.

I saw this effect in action in Fuck Buttons’ performance. They opened their set with a chiming, asymmetrically patterned sample of bells. Allowing this to lull the audience into a false sense of security, they twisted a knob to drop a fuzzed-out wall of guitar onto the hapless but tenacious bells. Each time they did so, the band members threw their bodies in some sort of spasm or physical interpretation of the music. The problem was that it felt hollow or affected. It was a conscious choice as much as an extension of the music; it left an impression of theatricality.

When Caribou took the stage, the band’s playing visually grabbed the audience in a way that Fuck Buttons, for all their creativity, couldn’t. While Fuck Buttons came off sort of like technicians scurrying around to prep a machine, Caribou left the impression of honest, organic and fluid interaction with the audience.

The difference is something like that between music and painting, or some other visual art. Fuck Buttons create a product that functions as a complete whole ““ it’s recorded on their album, and they did a good job of reproducing it live. But watching them reproduce it doesn’t carry much interest in itself. You could watch the painter to imitate his brush strokes, but it likely wouldn’t be much of much more than technical interest to observe the whole process. The ultimate experience of the painting is seeing the finished, static product; the Fuck Buttons experience is listening to the programmed, complete album.

I’m always interested in avoiding musical orthodoxy, and I have no interest in expecting all bands to perform on live instruments or making any broad points about electronic music as opposed to acoustic music. In general, pretty much everyone who has made blanket statements about the use of electricity in music has, over time, been shown wrong. However, there is something of a problem when it comes to the act of translating the music of a band that relies on prerecorded sounds in a live concert, and that problem lies in making the live elements of the experience interesting.

Of course, this is a problem that has, at least by some musicians, been solved. Daft Punk transformed their live act into the space-robot, other-world circus that it is precisely for this reason. Their music has always worked, but now they’ve given themselves the visual experience to match.

Unfortunately, the Daft Punk budget is a little steep for your average indie noise two-piece outfit, not to mention divergent from their take on aesthetics. But as more and more young musicians discover electronics as a way to realize the sounds that they are hearing, and as concertgoers continue to demand an exciting live experience, musicians will need to keep looking for a way to provide a little more to look at than dudes in flannel shirts and tight pants pressing a space bar.

If you think LaRue chose this topic just so he could swear in print, e-mail LaRue at [email protected].