EM1 Essay
Puppy: Live, Or In Stereo?
Introduction
The term "electronic media" is thankfully,
still a quite broad term. I intend to push it to the limits by using an electronic
music band's live show for half of my essay. For the other half, I'm using
the same bands enhanced CD. I'm interested mainly in the interaction presented
by each. Does one prefer the real thing to the recording? Or, is the recording
the real thing? These lines are blurred when you come across a group that
covers all aspects included in the term "electronic media". Electronic media
by definition is mainly a documented, tangible thing that presents itself
to you time and time again, at your will. Does a concert with audio and visual
elements fall under this definition? I intend to come to some sort of conclusion.
Skinny Puppy hail from Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada. The group formed in 1981, and recently broke up in 1996. They pioneered
early dance/industrial music, finally becoming more of a sonic art group in
the late nineties. They were one of the earliest bands to combine classical
electronic elements and new-wave synth-pop. cEVIN kEY, one of the founders,
often said that Skinny Puppy was born to torment the eighties, as heavy-metal
did to rock-n-roll. The type of music they made came to be called "industrial".
Industrial music enjoyed a cult following through
most of the eighties and early nineties. With Skinny Puppy enjoying much of
the success. Pop music began to incorporate elements from the music, and today
we have Marilyn Manson. Coincidentally, Skinny Puppy broke up about the same
time.
Lives shows from Skinny Puppy have always been
theatrical in nature, often resembling performance art. Towards the second
half of their career, the shows became much more technologically oriented.
Use of large video screens, specially programmed lighting, and synchronisation
techniques locked all elements together in a live format. The show was still
at the will of the musicians, but different elements were working together
as one. This is unquestionably electronic multi-media, interactivity preserved.
Listen to the first ten seconds of any Skinny
Puppy song, and you will undoubtedly agree that it qualifies as electronic
music. The band was founded on manipulation of tape loops, later moving to
samplers. The music was always dark and methodical, but lacked structure.
After some years working exclusively on music, the sounds became very complete
and organised; if you can call chaos organised. Anyhow, not long after the
end of their career as a band, a double enhanced CD set was released. The
set includes unreleased music from the span of their career, along with Director
Projectors that include videos, live clips, and home movies. Each CD has a
separate Projector, one dealing with the early music, the other with the recent
music.
If the same song is presented in either format,
what will you remember from each? I've been to a show, they played "Harsh
Stone White". I don't really remember how the bass line stabbed like it does
on my stereo. I remember the spinning lights, and the bruise I got from the
pit. Then again, I couldn't quite pick out the vocals in that mix. What did
I miss?
The Enhanced CD
The CD set cost me about £11, it comes in a
paper fold-out CD holder with appropriate graphics and such. The availability
is quite limited, so I had to special order it from my local shop. It took
two weeks to arrive, I was quite excited when I got the phone call from the
store.
The first CD , titled "Back", takes the listener
back to the first days of the band. Starting with demos from 1981, extending
to a left-over from their 1989 release. The music is brilliant, of course.
The early demos suffer from lack of recording quality, but any die-hard fan
would look past that. The music segment is still quite long considering that
the CD is Enhanced; running at about sixty minutes. It took me awhile before
I could throw it in the Computer.
The Enhancement portion is cross-platform, which
impressed me even more, considering the amount of audio. It opened quite nicely
on my Mac, no memory or extension problems. It was a three year old Quadra,
the PowerPC had been around for about two and a half of those years. I imagine
any CD-ROM equipped Mac could handle it easily. If I hadn't have had Quicktime,
it is supplied along with the program.
After a short set of programming credits, a
dimly lit room appears on the screen. As you move the mouse it changes identity
over certain articles in the room. If you click on the candle, it lights and
illuminates the room, showing you the objects in closer detail. There is a
globe, a fan, a radio, and other antique items. The globe is the most fun.
Once you click the globe, the screen performs
a very Director-like fade, and becomes a wall map of Europe. Dots of different
colors mark most of the major cities. If you click on a dot, you see an excerpt
of home videos shot at that stop on their 1989 tour. Most samples are about
ten to fifteen seconds long. They offer a candid look at the band. It reminds
the fans that these guys like to have fun and be people too. Most people think
of the band as brooding, evil, depressed musicians. Often the band are quite
funny, or quite intoxicated. Either way, it's nice too see; although the band
only enjoyed moderate success, you still didn't get to meet them in the end.
After dimming the candles, there is light at
the other end of the room; this illuminates the picture on the wall, which
shows you a clip from a live show. These are obvious camcorder shots. The
quality is lacking, but the sound seemed to have been recorded from the mixing
desk. Other objects in the room play more clips. The quality is pretty low
throughout. You can double the size, which helps if your monitor is up to
speed. The shows range from very early appearances to the 1989 tour. The nice
thing about the clips is that they are obviously chosen for their clear close
ups and stage shots. When you can only see thirty seconds of a band, you want
to see the important things. Unfortunately, the tiny blurred screen and eight
bit audio cannot stand par to the real thing.
There are more options, including a telescope
which displays the band biography, and an article by an old Skinny Puppy fan.
But the main areas of interest are the home videos and live clips.
The second CD, named "Forth" chronicles the
latter part of the Skinny Puppy legacy. The CD portion is of much better quality
than the earlier tracks. Of course by this time they recorded primarily in
posh studios. There is still quite a bit of music, coming in at around 57
minutes of CD audio. The enhanced portion on this CD is the most impressive
however. After the obligatory programming credits, an eerie face appears on
the screen. After moving the mouse a bit you realise that this is a VR environment.
As you hold the mouse and move, the environment swings around in an almost
3-D manner. You can look up and down and around. As you pass over an object
the mouse character changes. Every object leads to a different file. The files
are anything from old pictures of the band to segments of videos.
Videos are very special to a Skinny Puppy fan.
MTV were never very good about throwing Skinny Puppy into the rotation. In
the past, they were available at quite some price from the record label. The
videos are of quite some quality, impressing me again with the compression.
At double size, the videos are very clear. The "Killing Game" video quite
impressed me, considering that the bulk of it is in black and white, with
very high contrast.
The nostalgic pictures of the band are more
a screen saver than anything. Some pictures truly stand out as beautiful digital
manipulations, but others are just some guys with funny haircuts. All in all,
still a bonus for the fan's wallpaper.
The CD portion of the set is a remarkable look
into the past and present of a band. The techniques employed by them in the
early days, including: tape manipulation, tape flanging, analogue pitch shifting,
etc. paved the way for future bands. The modern, Enhanced parts of the CDs
illustrate the bands grasp on the most modern of media technologies.
The band uses the resource of a computer to
virtually recreate the entire experience of the band. It's an interesting
concept to think about. In the future, a "pseudoCD" will allow the user to
immerse himself in the life and music of a band. This primitive attempt at
that ideal is a pioneering one, just as all of Skinny Puppy's work has been.
nfortunately, the attempt is primitive. Technology
limits us to crude playbacks and slide shows. Still, the concept of the project
can break those barriers and prepare us for what's to come.
CDs have limitations. They sound different on
every stereo, they skip, they break, they crack, they're digital. Software
has limitations. It works different on every computer, it gets bugs, it gets
outdated, it's digital. Memory however, is the most superior recording medium
of all. Until virtual reality is an actual reality. Senses cannot be commanded
simply by a stereo...no matter how good it sounds.
The Show
The show in question took place in June of 1992.
The ticket cost me around £10.00. I had to make sure to order them early,
or the show would have sold out. After a lengthy drive to Miami Beach, Florida,
I had to pay to park the car, and walk to the venue. The doors opened at seven,
and the show started around nine.
By nine, the venue was completely full, and
very hard to navigate through. The show started with an opening band. They
were awful. The crowd was beginning to get very angry with them, then they
stopped. After about an hour of waiting for the stage change, Skinny Puppy
took to the stage.
The stage was adorned with sci-fi/horror images.
To the left there was a huge tree, with various objects and body parts hanging
from it. To the right was a funny looking machine with lights all over it.
The backdrop, stage center, was a huge video screen, at least fifteen feet
tall.
The video screen flickered on just as the first
sounds were heard. After an intro, black and white images flashed on the screen.
Along with a silhouette of a man walking into the picture from the side. Nivek
Ogre, the singer, walked on stage along with the image. He moved the same
as the silhouette moved, until it was revealed that he was missing an arm!
Along with a sudden change in music, the image fell, along with Ogre, to the
bottom of the screen. After your attention is taken off of the video, you
realise that every aspect of the show is in complete harmony with one another.
The lights move as the music does. After a few songs, that funny machine starts
to light up on the right of the stage.
Ogre walks towards it and grabs the pole on
top. He sticks his head inside the underneath opening. Synonomously, his head
appears on the screen behind. The video is an elaborate montage of computer
imaging. His face is transformed by tentacle-like things. As the singer falls
from inside the machine, the face on the screen follows. Smaller TV screens
begin to flicker across the stage. They play a montage of images, mainly political
in nature. The screens change with the beat of the music.
The lighting effects were most dramatically
seen when the band performed "Harsh Stone White". The bass drum in the song
is a machine-gun like roll. The lights were white, focused into the shape
of a ring with two notches. The lights would float across the stage with the
chorus. When the bass drum would fill in, the notches on the rings spun in
succession. The rings would range from ten to fifteen feet in diameter, making
the effect quite large. The audience really enjoyed it, almost paying more
attention to the walls than the stage.
At the end of the set, all the lights turned
off, and the screens went blank. The encore was the band without the hi-tech
imagery, and dramatics. The encore was a great baseline with which to judge
the rest of the show. The music was the same, but without the rest it seemed
more like the CD at home. The previous hour had filled my head with dizzying
amounts of data. Once I became accustomed to processing it, the encore was
a bit boring.
The senses I had at the show were real and all
around me. I wasn't staring at a screen on top of my desk. I saw the band
make the music that controlled the lights that controlled the crowd that controlled
the band. Human expression is a useful tool for interaction, after all. I
got a cut in the pit, I had some girl screaming and pushing me all night,
I got to the stage. I walked out of that concert hall covered in sweat, and
tired. I had a truly demanding physical and mental experience.
The show was a great time, but what have I really
kept from it? I bought a t-shirt, still have my ticket stub, and found a bootleg
about a year later. The cut on my leg still has a scar. But, the smells, the
pain, the pushy girl behind you, are all left in my head. That works out great
until the day I can't remember if she was a brunette or not.(She was)
The show was a directed interpretation of the
music. It was the band's idea of how the music should be presented. The same
can be said for the Enhanced CD. The artists thought of a way to deliver their
art in the most expressive manner technology allowed them. In a live venue
packed with people, technology allows for a lot of possibility, and allot
of lee-way. Real-life experiences can be more faithfully recreated if they
are in-fact real.
In software form, the experience is restricted
in so many ways. Just commercially, you have the differing speeds and OS's
on peoples computers. You need compression utilities to fit anything tangible
onto an audio CD. Real life ideas go through so many filters before it can
be represented in computer form. Unfortunately those filters remove from them.
What About Them?
The whole point is to find out what one's got
and what it don't. To take the experience from each, and run them through
the board. I paid just about the same for each. I had to wait about the same
time to experience each. I did have to drive almost 300 miles for the show
though. With menial matters set aside, let's get to the goods.
As far as a band goes, the main judge of character
and intent is of course the music. Skinny Puppy excel at re-creating the studio
sessions live, with a few interesting tricks. The drums, most notably, are
played live for the most part. Special drum sounds can be triggered from the
acoustic/electric hybrid kit. The keyboard parts are handled live as well.
The glue that holds the set together is the assignment of certain background
parts to the computer. All vocal effects are pre-programmed to follow the
pattern beat by beat. This allows the synchronisation with the multi-media
show. The effect is the feeling of a live show, with the complexity of the
studio album.
As with any concert though, acoustics and crowds
can have a detrimental effect to any live sound. Luckily, the Cameo Theatre
in Miami was pretty well designed. The sloped ceiling behind the orchestra
area carried the sound away without much early reflection. The crowd was noisy,
but the music more than over-powered them.
I have a very nice set of computer monitors.
I actually prefer them to my Hi-Fi. This makes the job of critiquing Enhanced
CDs much more enjoyable. Perhaps a little too much. I'll try to remember how
it was with the little speakers that come with PCs, or the little speaker
in the back of Macs.
The CDs are really gems. It offers a look through
the whole history of the band. Most songs appear on other CDs, the early demos
and out takes are featured here.
That's a good thing about shows also, that they
go through old and new material. After ten albums though, an hour and a half
can seem pretty short.
In the end, I can come to only one conclusion.
Live shows are good for that live feeling, music seems to take a second to
the whole experience. Skinny Puppy happen to be very good at both live; which
they proved with the encore. Looking back, it sounded the best. (Was that
because it was, or the lack of imagery made it seem to somehow?) The CD is
great for sitting around the house or throwing on at a party. It's always
there.
Since we are talking about "multi-media" here,
lets get to that. The imagery involved at the show was mind blowing. The movie
on the video screened was carefully planned out. It had to be to be able to
go that well with the music and show. As the sound would slowly evolve and
change between songs, so would the screen. It told a story to accompany the
music, often with just abstract images and light.
The "Forth" CD contains a video that was taken
directly from the video for the concert. It's called "Killing Game", and is
included in the Shockwave movie on this site. It's really the only thing to
come close to illustrating that aspect of the show. The live clips on the
CD are all taken from previous concerts. The "Testure" clip originates from
the previous tour, It is the most modern on the CD. It is interesting to see
the evolution from past to present. It seems to follow technologies progress.
The lights at the show are still the most impressive
I've ever seen, and I've been to plenty of hi-tech shows. They were planned
just as carefully as the video element. The lights would evolve rather than
change. During the whole show there was never a break in anything. The lights,
sound, and video were always on. Often times the interludes between songs
would approach a song's length, taking on their own life. An organic quality
was omnipresent through all aspects of the show. The stage would get dark,
but a very controlled diffused dark. When the lights were full on, they were
very intense. Often taking focused shapes and mimicking lasers.
The CD just has nothing to compare with this.
As before, the live clips are all quite inferior to this tour. Plus, let's
face it, computer screens aren't all that big. In the day of holographic projectors,
and sim-stim, this won't be a problem; but until then....
Interactivity approaches a touchy point. As
a musician, I've experienced the idea from both sides. A crowd can be a most
interactive medium. When you're on stage playing music, you want the crowd
to react. That reaction, good or bad, changes your reaction to the crowd.
There weren't any knobs to turn, or buttons to push. If you screamed loud
enough the band could hear it though. The more people clapping and dancing,
the tighter the band seemed to play. The CD is push and point, no doubt, but
it lacks that live feel again.
I've been to electronic music shows where you
do control the music directly. Knobs and buttons adorned huge consoles around
a large gallery. You could even plug your own sound sources into the mix.
It was all organised by the artist, who sat behind a rather large mixing desk
and rack of processors. It's a novel idea, and I had great fun. Most of the
music was horrible, with shining moments that made you say "Wow". It had a
live feel, but a terribly controlled one. This was an art gallery, not a night-club.
It was real-time, random, and, I feel, quite a cop-out on the artist's part.
When it comes down to it, I prefer a live show
to a cheesy CD-ROM. When technology allows software to convey complex sensual
ideas on the desktop, I might change my tune. It is an irony that the whole
live show was orchestrated by computers running complex software to control
real things. They were only told how fast to go by the band. When you try
it with virtual things, with you at control of just about everything, it pales.
What I think
Throughout the creation of this essay, my mind
has gone down many paths for conclusion. What I once though of as electronic
media has changed a bit. I hope this idea translates to the reader as well.
Electronic media can be anything. If someone
paints a beautiful painting, then takes a picture of it, finally putting it
on a web-site, that idea becomes electronic. The same can be said for someone
singing, or dancing, or playing an acoustic guitar. The idea becomes electronic.
The original work remains real, while the idea becomes virtual. In an age
where ideas are becoming more and more tangible, electricity seems to be the
main carrier.
When dealing with something so real as a concert,
electricity becomes more than just a carrier for information. The electricity
feeding through the synthesiser and the lights becomes the idea. On a computer,
this feeling is lost.
Therefore, the only thing I can think of is
that both are mutually exclusive of one another. Neither the show or the CD
are real. Both are separate aspects of an idea. The idea is the reality. Electricity
only brings this idea to fruition, in drastically different forms. Electronic
media is a powered form of interpretation, being controlled in a manner seem
fit to the creator; or, what capabilities are presented to the creator. Computers
have come a long way in forty-plus years of evolution. Even with goggles however,
it's not like being there.
The Enhanced CD provides limitless entertainment,
and information.(Until it breaks) The audio quality is mainly top-notch, it
works fine on most computers, it provides in-depth details on the bands career.
It's interface is quite nice, and everything looks good as well. It really
does impressive things considering the small size of the files.
The concert was one of the most amazing things
I've ever seen. That was over six years ago. The memories are still there,
it just seems harder to find them. Until the day of downloading from the brain,
my camcorder bootleg will have to suffice. I still qualify the show as "electronic
media", but it's more like watching the process in respect to software. Think
of the best CD-ROM you've seen. What if you could watch the authors create
them? It only takes two hours. Plus a lengthy car-ride.