Like my other ‘surprise hit’, The Quahog Stalker, An Evening With Ada was never intended to be performed live but seems to have burst out of the studio and into real life for a few gigs.
Ada is a much more complex, and far longer piece than the former though, and performing it live is quite a different affair. While Quahog Stalker could be performed live quite happily with four triggered samples and a lot of violin playing, Ada needs a major rethink. Although violin is the lead instrument there isn’t actually that much on it. The piece is full of synths, guitars and basses as well as recorded samples. Simply playing those and adding the violin where it appears, wouldn’t really be a satisfying live event, for me or the audience.
As this is targetted eventually at the SoundSpiral, and the first performance would be in 7.1 surround sound I thought that with an immersive environment, maybe less is probably more – you don’t want lots of complex things happening all around you, it’ll just get confusing and messy. So I set about removing things from the set as well as replacing some (mainly guitar) parts with violin.
When I came to perform at Sonic Arts Forum a technical problem meant that the rear pair of speakers didn’t work (this was my technical problem, not the organiser’s) and the piece still worked, so I came to the conclusion that even less is even more! While some of the parts that were missing from the back speakers were things I would rather not have done without (and traces of them came out of the subwoofer anyway) I proceeded to remove even more things from the set.
The piece is now a lot sparser than it was originally and, in a live context, probably better. I still like and stand-by the original recording (for another similar studio project I would do the same again quite happily) but live is a different experience and you don’t have chance to carefully consider bits and revisit them as you do when listening to a recording.
I’ll be playing all of the new Ada in Second Life this Saturday 11th May at my favourite online venue Music Island. That’s really all of it … all 40 minutes, so it should be quite an event. Because of restrictions of Second Life audio it will be back to stereo for this performance – though there will be a virtual SoundSpiral!
The concert at Sonic Arts Forum was video recorded so you can watch it below. I wore a regency-style posh dress for the occasion, I love the way it contrasts will all the high tech equipment on the stage! You can see me disappear to check my laptop here and also I apologise for messing up the aspect ratio, I’m not quite that tall and thin!
[…] are, I must admit, but I think we’ll fit in well. I might even wear the long dress I wore at SAF earlier this year which should add to the steampunk […]