Checking My Emails

There's always a relationship between the artist and their instrument, their tools, their craft. Sometimes, this relationship is entirely hidden, discrete, in the service of some other effect or dynamic. At others, this relation serves to illuminateand motivate the work.

When toxic cultural-generational forces go unchallenged however, and the artist comes to think that their relationship with their software is somehow constitutive of a performance, then there's obviously going to be trouble.

Nathan Fake (who I'd assumed might be a Nathan Barleyesque Hoxton parody of laptop musician-ry) turned out to be far worse: exactly that parody apparently unaware that because his software enables him to throw 4 ideas per 8 bars into his (obviously automated) set, he is thereby exempted from having to decide which of his ideas are any good at all.

As Chris pointed out, pithy to the max as always, "it's like a badly scratched Jamiroquai CD". I felt like I was trapped in the bedroom of someone who's bandwidth and Ableton had left them with a dizzying quantity of material and no idea whatsoever how to engage an audience with it. The floppy-fringed, head-nodding vapidity of his physical (barely) presence merely exacerbated the sense that what we were watching was a limpidly extended wank.

Jon Hopkins, thankfully, was a humble, wired, relentlessly numble-fingered pad-triggering, parameter-stretching presence, whose clipped but generous and colourful techno brought an un-reflective smile to all and sundry; his performative relationship with the computer was always one of an artist having let loose his machinery and now found himself struggling to keep up with what it was then enabled to do.