Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Deadmau5 next week at Oslo Spektrum

I was swapping through TV channels last night, and settled on MTV Live, which just happened to be showing some choice live sessions from Roskilde 2011. Exactly at the time I watched, Deadmau5 was performing. I have to say that I’ve never seen anything quite like it, but to be truthful, I haven’t been following a lot of the new music for some years now. It got to be too difficult, with all of the 'one popular song' groups that came and went. I haven't heard of Deadmau5 before, but he has been around since 2005. Anyway, this was just out and out wild! Really caught my attention, especially because the main performer--Joel Thomas Zimmerman—wears on his head what he calls a ‘mau5head’, which is some kind of computer-controlled mouse head with large ears. This mouse head appears in many different colors and designs, and the expressions on the face shift and change shape and swirl. A sinister (Mickey) mouse staring out at the audience from the darkness, into the darkness, from some chaotic fractal hell. The visuals were fantastic, and for me at least, it was a rare glimpse into the future, how electronic music will be (probably a hundred times more sophisticated by that time—let’s say forty years from now) in terms of the digital effects, computer-controlled light show, use of strobe lights and anything else that musicians use these days to heighten the effect of their music. These are just a few of the instruments he uses (and that I’ve NEVER heard of—info from Wikipedia): Nord Lead 2x, Moog Little Phatty, Voyager RME, Ableton, Fruity Loops, Allen & Heath Xone 3D, Allen & Heath Xone 4D, Lemur Input Device, Ableton Live, Monome 256, Reaktor, Cubase, Kaossilator, Nuendo, Native Instruments Maschine, Smithson Martin Emulator, and Dave Smith Instruments Prophet '08. And in a case of synchronicity, while I was online reading about him, I saw that he is playing at Oslo Spektrum next Wednesday, May 30th. So I got tickets. I’m looking forward to seeing him live. I’ll let you know how it was next week.

The surreal world we live in

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