I have now got back from tonights performance of Liquid Animation 7… It was interesting. The theatre is only small, with about 80 people there with seating for about 100. The first performance was probably the most unique that I have EVER EVER seen or heard. They had an electric guitar. That was fine. It was turned up, with a single person playing it. OK. For about 20 minutes. That is OK too…

Playing it was interesting. This meant placing it horizontally on the musicians lap. And that is where things got strange. He took a buzzer and placed it on the neck of the guitar, and moved the guitar slightlt to make different noises. Notice I did not say music. Noises. What was even more bizzare is the strange effects if you slightly moved your head… you would get a totally different effect. And the other thing that was happening is that your mind would try to make sense of the noise and try to fit music to it. Bizzare.

Then came a duo… Their first piece involved taking a lute, and bending the sound with a wacom graphics tablet, creating feedback sounds at the same time. Then they used some signal processing engine to play lots of percussion doing sampling and playback in real time. Slightly strange, particularly when the sounds were played back backwards.

And the final lady performing was using large delays on microphones and had the sound repeating too… Which made a really interesting, albeit bizzare sound scape. I did not enjoy this performance as well as the others. Although the first one was just way out there and seemed to be devoid of musical content, I did actually find it to be probably the most interesting piece.

I found it quite interesting… the entire event. I will probably go to it again next year, but it really is one of those type of events where you need to discuss the performaces with others… Makes a lot more sense that way.