VJ Heaven

Thought I would mention that I just caught his show at Sonar in Barcelona on 18th of June. This also tails in with RayV’s post back in March via VJ Forums regarding the iPhone app. I was skeptical about his visuals after seeing a less then exciting performance in London at Field Day 2008.

Well 2 years later and as Plastikman he has really raised the bar. I went with my friend who demanded we go. This was my friends second, he caught Plastikman LIVE in Detroit at DEMF a few weeks ago. He mentioned the iPhone app SYNK but I didn’t pay much attention to it. It wasnt until the show started that I truely understood what was going on. We were camped right up front and had a great view of the curved LED screen that surrounded Mr. Hawtin which occasionaly highlighted him and projected his shadow on the LED screen. To me it looked like he was a mad scientist in his lab busily working away with thunderous bass and electrical strobe storms going on all around.

I was a little upset that I didn’t bring my proper Canon camera. All the videos and photos were shot with my Sony Ericson c905 mobile phone. I must admit the images and videos are not all that bad.

YouTube- Plastikman LIVE @ Sonar,Barcelona 2010.MP4

Richie starts his show with a nice intro that builds into well produced audio visual experience all the way to the very end and just when you think it’s over he comes out with a hammering encore that leaves you wanting more. During his show iPhone users who have the application SYNK installed can interact via Wi-FI with his performance by monitoring track information, bpm, effects and elements. But what I found cool was when Plastikman allowed users to trigger wordsamples in realtime. FTW, that’s pretty badass in my opinion. For more info visit http://www.plastikman.com/

View full post on Inside The Vault

Touch performance control on devices like the iPhone and iPad has become increasingly popular, but the question remains: can developers push these interfaces further? Richie Hawtin has initiated a new touch control project and promises more “advanced” control of Ableton Live for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users.

Details remain murky – developers Liine say they’ll tease out features over the coming weeks. But the system, when fully revealed, will be modular, with a set of touch objects and gestures across a set of apps that provide touch control. The first application is Ableton Live-specific, and provides a new mechanism for controlling Live’s grid of clips. The developers say Griid makes it easier to find clips and see information about them, even when navigating large sets of clips. (You know who you are, those of you with enormous Live sets with a zillion colored clips.)

Different editions will scale to different screen sizes, with Griid Pro for iPad, and Griid for iPhone/iPod touch, plus a Lite version for free.

What all of this means or whether it lives up to these claims is, well, a complete unknown outside of the Plastikman stage. That is, unless you happen to be in Barcelona at SONAR this weekend. Tomorrow, Saturday, Richie will be demonstrating the app in person. Liine tells us:

“At the hands-on Richie will show how he uses the app in his Plastikman Live show. There will also be another laptop or two set up and hooked up with Griid so that they can give it a try themselves.”

If you can make it and want to report back to the rest of us, I’d love to hear it. And I expect to bring more info to CDM soon, if not. But it certainly works for Richie; check out the video below of him using the tool at Detroit’s Movement festival, for his new Plastikman Live show. (And yes, this is bringing back Plastikman and more of the live performance, rather than simply DJ, the side of Richie a lot of us love best.)

http://liine.net/griid/
http://liine.net/

If you’re at SONAR, check out http://ghost.m-nus.com/ (and if you’re not, that site has live streams and audio – warning, audio auto-plays!)

View full post on Create Digital Music