Comparative Case Study in Respective Design Choices Eliciting Heightened Multisensory Experience Within Contemporary Concert Performances
In the following essay I will examine and compare the authored design choices present within three recent concert performances of contemporary live music performance groups giving clear consideration to the heightened multisensory experience of the audience. I have selected three performances that I personally attended from 2010 to 2016 that each employed distinct and strategic sensory design choices to elicit heightened experiences within comparable venue spaces and patronage.
Autechre - Hifi Bar (Melbourne) Saturday 29th May 2010
Autechre have famously performed their live shows with all house lights and lighting intentionally disengaged for most of their career. This is an authored design choice intended to focus the audience’s attention on the sound and make them confront the effect of their visual bias. This is not simply the absence of light, Autechre have employed minimalist design considerations all throughout their work over their entire career. Their live show is no exception, the complete absence of light is as much a visual design choice as the deployment of negative space within minimalist design as is silence within minimalist sonic compositions. The darkness is the visual element within the show. By enforcing the absence of light within every performance the audience is forced to confront the impact of visual bias has on both performer and audience.
Interestingly, the live experience of this enacted design principle is as polarizing as the group’s perpetually mixed album review scores.
Observing the behaviours of the crowd, I noticed a considerable amount of the audience seemed disoriented and mobile - over the duration of the performance moving around the room and facing in different directions, talking amongst themselves facing away from or at right angles to the stage - clearly unsettled or otherwise disengaged. The remainder of the audience were hyper focused on the sound, highly engaged and clearly having individual experiences or shared with small groups. The audio recording of the performance is a mix of the desk audio and a microphone capture that was placed within the crowd. At certain points in the recording conversations between overexcited patrons can be heard discussing their perception of the sound, at one stage describing it as, “like an aural painting” and, “it’s like they’re throwing noise at each other” in between guttural exclamations of delight and hysteria. For some of the crowd clearly this was a highly visual experience.
“If people have their eyes shut that’s good for us, and we prefer that to visuals. If you have amazing visuals but the music’s no good, then you’ve channeled your energy in the wrong conduit. Without lights people go off at more of a tangent, and shift to another parallel. The club space, if it’s dark and a bit foggy, with a console of twitching lights – that’s the ideal venue for us.” - Rob Brown (musicomh.com, 2010)
The disorientating elements of the performance are not exclusively that of the lighting choice, but also the non conformity of the rhythmic and melodic structure of the music itself. Expressive atonal, microtonal or entirely textural elements were imposed over firstly very repetitive simplistic rhythmic structures, then over very non repetitive complex rhythmic structures. The movements between these structural changes gave the sense that they were improvised and not following conventional metering conventions and other musical grammar that most audiences are conditioned to synchronise their tension/release responses to.
From my personal experience I estimate is that approximately 40% of the crowd were disengaged for most of the performance for the above reasons. I found myself disengaging during the early moments of extreme repetition, but I used those moments to observe the crowd. I found lack of conventional metering and musical grammar to be highly immersive and the absence of light to absolutely assist with the immersion.
Physiologically, the utilisation of the frequency spectrum and stereo spatialisation were the primary agents of action for an otherwise predominantly cerebral experience. A paradoxical sensation of perpetual tension counterbalanced by either comforting tones or swaying rhythms akin to the sensation of travel by boat, being pummelled by waves. Many rhythmically dense moments had the sensation of being a pinball, the polyrhythmic interaction between triplet and non triplet quantized percussion colliding against each other in a paradoxically half mechanical half relaxed groove again arising in an ongoing emotional flux of tension and release dispersed at the micro level within the bar, as opposed to the conventional compositional macro level across the traditional 8 or 16 measures.
Autechre are uncompromising in their artistic vision, in spite of their own fanbase. It is difficult to declare that the alteration to the described disorienting elements of their performances would be anything but a compromise. Disorientation is key to the appreciation of their work, as is the individualised audience experience. One might critique the repetitive compositional elements or the long stretches of spatialised atonal textures in aid of keeping the music conventionally engaging and assemble the crowd with more unifying moments of cheering - but this would be to misunderstand the key elements of what is distinctive and perplexingly sublime about the sensorial experience of Autechre’s performance work. These long stretches function in the same fashion as the lighting, the absence of familiar musical grammar forces the audience into individualised experiences either rich, engaged and imaginative, even contemplative - or disengaged and devoid of interest. For my money, I wouldn’t trade those rich individualised experiences of inner dialogue for want of a more unified audience experience. It is exactly the sublime and challenging moments of an Autechre performance that brings into question the fundamentals of everything one thinks one knows about music. For some this is a claustrophobic experience, for others liberating.
Academically, there is not a wealth of literature devoted to the analysis of the Autechre live experience aside from a few reviews from old magazines. Fundamentally this is a highly individualised experience that either works for you or it doesn’t - much like their discography. A fundamentally idiosyncratic and enigmatic group, Autechre’s design elements remain largely untouched by serious technical analysis within academic spheres. If any parallels were to be drawn to existing design concepts it would be to the tenets of minimalism, in spite of their apparent maximalism. Within minimalism the strokes or actions are equally important as the inaction. This is ever present within their live performance, where drawn out moments of inaction where generative rhythms and evolving textures aren’t imposed on by the performers leading to moments of contemplation and reflection within the engagement to the present sensorial moment.
Amon Tobin’s ISAM - Palace Theatre (Melbourne) Tuesday 5th June 2012
To many, Amon Tobin’s ISAM concert tour heralded a new age of multimedia concert performances - the spectacle of the custom fabricated geometric structure being projected onto from multiple projectors playing a perpetually changing array of choreographed and audio reactive imagery in conjunction with a sonically and dynamically rich score was truly a new frontier for live performance and executed at an extremely professional level. Indeed, this was the work of an entire production team headed by both V-Squared Labs & Leviathan creating customised software and visual elements and a four person set design and construction team.
In stark polar contrast to Autechre’s approach to live performance, ISAM was a maximal visual spectacle, meticulously choreographed and rehearsed down to every last pixel designed to captivate and overwhelm the visual senses. Even the performer was hidden away inside the set, only being made visible during a few moments during the performance and very much dwarfed by the whole spectacle. It is in this sense that there is a parallel between Autechre’s obfuscation of performer identity behind the grand spectacle of the show itself. Though their response was entirely different. When the spotlight became pointed at Tobin, he attempted to match the grandiosity of the set with highly exaggerated performance gestures as if to communicate with the audience that he was indeed in control of this gigantic spectacle before retreating back into his small cube and becoming once again obscured from the audience’s vision. For some, this was an exciting moment. For others including myself this felt like an overcorrection. An akward moment that attempted to counterbalance the extremely scripted nature of the performance with a moment of humanity - executed through highly exaggerated and most likely mimed theatrical gestures.
Though for many this would have felt like the next evolution of live music performance, when considered from this perspective it is in actuality further removed from this status than it approaches. The visual spectacle and scripted, choreographed nature of the performance places it closer to the domain of theatre and film. Each audio track of the performance had an accompanying visual routine, computer generated elements primarily acting as a kind of audio synced pantomime. My memories of the show were not of the sound, but of the visuals. The performer is almost incidental - exemplified by his almost purposeless existence hidden away behind the set. The kineticism is entirely present within the highly dynamic and syncretic visual elements, not in the performance of the sound, in spite of Tobin’s attempts to be appearing to do so.
“So I started storyboarding it and decided it would make sense if the whole thing was a kind of physical journey, so the structure could be a vehicle. It came from that. It is an adolescent fantasy, it is sci-fi. At the end of the day, it’s not trying to be high art. It’s a visual soundtrack to a piece of music. It doesn’t have to be an incredibly deep story full of metaphor to do that; it just has to be evocative and imaginative.”
Amon Tobin (inthemix.com, 2012)
There were emotional swells elicited from the crowd during mutual exclaims of “ooh’s” and “aah’s” and a genuine feeling that the entire room had been taken back to a childlike feeling of wonder, exemplified and prompted by the subject matter of some of the visual routines like blocks falling down stairs, space ships, robots and the like. But there was a fundamental separation between audience and the spectacle that interfered with immersion. Where I felt like the performers were as much part of the experience as the audience with Autechre all together in a dark room, I felt like even Tobin was separate from the performance - that we were all watching this spectacle run its course from start to finish with Tobin making the occasional cameo.
The history behind big budget multimedia shows is a recent one - acts like Daft Punk and Muse are arguably better known for the work of their production team than their music. As the industry has shifted towards live music revenue over album sales the necessity for spectacle has driven more high profile acts to adopt gigantic multimedia set pieces and routines to their shows in order to provide a new heightened sensory experience for their audiences to add value to their shows. In almost all cases however, this never extends thematically or conceptually beyond the realms of shock and awe.
Sunn o))) - Max Watts (Melbourne) Wednesday 16th March 2016
Somewhere between the pantomime gratuity of ISAM and the reflective min/maximalism of Autechre lies the live performance aesthetics of Sunn o))). There are rules to a Sunn o))) performance. The sound pressure levels will always be extreme. There will be enough fog from the smoke machines to entirely obscure your vision for most of the performance. There will be men in cloaks on the stage.
The experience of a Sunn o))) performance is gruelling, harrowing - but rewarding. The sensorial elements of the extreme amounts of fog and decibels coupled with the over capacity sold out show attendance ensures a perpetual state of tension - for some, sensorial claustrophobia. The inescapable nature of cumulative body heat, the fog making it hard to breathe and see or smell whilst being entirely overwhelmed by the extreme sound pressure levels leads inevitably to a state of pure submission or inner turmoil. Rather than the musical accompaniment and physical performance assaying to alleviate this tension through energetic composition or gestures, instead both the music and the performance is long, slow and drawn out to a glacial pace that heighten the rest of the elements to critical levels.
A Sunn o))) performance is as much an exercise in brutality as it is in inner reflection and contemplation. Much in the same modality as Autechre’s strategic sensorial disorientation eliciting highly individual and imaginative responses and inner dialogue - Sunn o))) pummels its audience fixing it to the spot and choking it like a large snake over the course of an hour, forcing each member of its audience to slow down and entirely abandon their thoughts in a macabre, confronting guided meditation. Shortly through the performance when thoughts of reprieve begin to emerge, as if by pure telepathy instead of the band changing the tone to build upon and away from the punishing start - the entire band leaves the stage leaving only the vocalist. Sonic minimalism pushed to an even further extreme. Given all that has preceded it, the experience of having everything removed to pure chanting is as close to true sonic existentialism as you could get. You could hear a pin drop in that place. Slowly you become aware that in fact the foggers have stopped and you are in a room full of utterly silent people staring up at a man intermittently growling incomprehensible lines of text illuminated by a single spotlight. It is almost biblical. You can hear exactly when the decay of the natural room reverb ends, a silent breathless eternity passes between each growling chant. When the band does eventually return and begin to layer rich, dense textures underneath once again you appreciate it, you actively become immersed in it. You relish it. For me, I chose this moment to close my eyes and yield completely. The experience was phenomenal. My senses were entirely distorted. Firstly the sensation of being in a crowded room were entirely inverted - this punishing perpetual sensation of being surrounded by fog, people, sound all of it entirely inverted. I had the distinct sensation of being in an extremely large warehouse, alone. This gave way to paying attention to my vision - remaining aware of my closed eyes and being acutely aware of the waves of sound hitting me my perceived notions of the dimensions of the room I was in became distorted and angular in relation to the frequency content and phase relationship of the distorted textures I was hearing. Let me now make clear that this was all under the influence of a single overpriced heineken.
When I finally opened my eyes I was greeted with the visage of the singer now wearing a dress and crown covered in broken mirrors and wearing lasers on each finger of both hands - posing dramatically. I nearly burst out in hysteria. Total immersion breaker. Unfortunately from that point forward I struggled to regain the complete immersion I experienced earlier in the performance. The mirror/laser costume and posing remained a feature until the end of the performance and never felt anything other than completely ridiculous. As if men chanting in robes and playing detuned guitars at ear damaging levels through more fog than a british winter morning wasn’t for some reason already utterly ridiculous.
At this stage I could discuss some of the history of the ritualistic and thematic elements that inform the Sunn o))) show, but ultimately that isn’t what made this a distinct, powerful experience for me. It was purely the extreme manipulation of sensorial elements that elicited such a powerful response. It was not through ritual theatrics or pantomime that engaged me, it was the confronting and punishing amplified minimalism that directly engaged me and led to some inner moments that I imagine are akin to lucid dreaming or deep meditation - having never been successful with either.
If there is a throughline to draw across all of these experiences, it is that perhaps the most powerful live sensorial experiences come not from what is added, but what is removed. The audience is challenged to engage on the deepest level when they first overcome their natural tendency for expectation - when expectation is perpetually challenged or subverted or beaten into submission the mind is liberated from the passivity of expectation. For some that becomes a catalytic moment of disengagement, the mind wandering from the moment. For others it allows the mind to wander in an altogether different modality. Heightening senses through the amplification of single elements like darkness, air density, sound pressure levels all elicit far more challenging and deeper experiences than a dynamic visually stunning set piece. A scripted multimedia pantomime may engross an entire crowd through scale, but ultimately can only be experienced at arms length. The strategic manipulation of the very sensory elements that make up the room housing the performance can be employed for much greater effect - though at the risk of the disengagement of some of their patrons.
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