MUTEK revisited (II)

5. Deadbeat/Monolake webjam

May 30, 2002: "To add a note or sound to the music, all one does is point and click at the desired spot in one of the stanzas. Scott's additions are in blue, Rob's are in red. All is composed on the fly. In real time. And following it is as easy as watching the bouncing ball - white dots sweep through the stanzas indicating the position in the music. "

Here's another one that hasn't aged well, or to be more fair, loses a lot when deprived of the live visual element. And that's not really a criticism -- the whole point of this was to pull off a real-time performance between two collaborators thousands of km apart, so it shouldn't matter too much if the resulting music doesn't come off well as a stand-alone piece. Sure, the music meanders quite a bit, and is mostly just two guys switching loops on and off for thirty minutes, but what do you expect considering the stated improvised nature of the performance and the fact that the musicians couldn't communicate with each other except via a few dancing dots on a computer screen? It feels like they didn't have a clear idea of where they were headed during the first ten minutes or so, but once they hit the intermittently beatless portion about halfway through and Monolake's icy ambient bits start floating about, then it starts to feel more like a cohesive piece of music.