Translator: Midori T
Reviewer: Riaki Poništ (Drum improvisation starts) (Drum improvisation ends) (Applause) Good afternoon. What I just did was
I played a short improvisation that's built on a very simple
electronic drum beat, which is usually
not performed by a drummer but generated by a drum machine
or a drum computer. And the reason why I choose
to do this obsolete task for you is the short story
that I would like to share with you. That story goes back
kind of like a long time.
As we were talking about apes,
it goes actually back to the apes, because – at one point, when the first monkey
was drumming on his chest, he did it because he wanted
to communicate something, and there is a theory that humans started
to communicate with speech around the same time
as they started to communicate – started to play the drums. And the first drum rhythms were probably a simulation
of speech patterns, and also because the amplitude
of the drums can reach a long distance, it became one of the first or possibly
the first telecommunications instrument, and it was used by many cultures to communicate with faraway entities
such as gods and spirits. And up to this day, we use drums
and rhythms to communicate but not necessarily to summon
fellow tribe members for a hunt or to signal troops on a battlefield, but the reason we use drums
or what we use it for is to communicate
cultural aesthetics and values.
Now – for instance, up until the 20th century, drums and rhythm didn’t have
a central function in Western music, and as soon as the frantic rhythms
of industrial machinery and the urban life itself were introduced, drums and rhythm went from the fringe
to the core of Western music culture. And the catalyst for that were mainly
three new technologies, which was: the drum set, jazz,
and the ability to record sound. And when those three new
technologies came together, they set up this big bang
of a rhythm universe that kind of expanded the triad
to the entire century. And every decade kind of spurred
new drum beats and a new rhythm set; sometimes they became
signals for the beginning or the end of an entire era. For instance, there was once a drumbeat that was a signal
to an entire generation of kids to go wild and rebel
against their parents. Kind of sounded like that. (Drumbeat) Now, about 25 years later, there was another drumbeat
that was a signal to their kids to go wild and rebel
against their parents.
(Drumbeat) So, a drumbeat, it can build,
but it can also destroy, and this interplay between culture
and counterculture always fascinated me, and I always loved the proximity of new innovative, fresh,
and revolutionary music. So when, decades after the introduction
of audio recording, digital technology became
the next big revolution in music, drum machines, computers, and sequencers also became a part
of my musical vocabulary. And – although those new tools changed
the landscape of how we produce music and offer a lot of possibilities,
still up to this day, or a human performance
with those digital tools. So – in a way, to deal with those limitations,
electronic music somehow embraced the limitation of electronic
synthesized sound and made it a central doctrine
of the stylistical expression.
So, drum computers became a simplified
abstraction of a real drummer. So, in a way, they created a new
but genuine expression with a fake, which is, kind of like,
what art is all about. Now – in the early 90s, something happened
that changed my life as an artist but especially as a drummer when I came across the mind-boggling
rhythms of a new electronic song genre called "jungle" and "drum 'n' bass," which I will play for you
a little bit later on. Those beats were so radically
different and new that I understood that they were no longer
abstractions of a real drummer, but they came purely out of the syntax
of drum machine programming. So, at that point, the vocabulary
of drum machine programming had surpassed the vocabulary
of real drummers to articulate and express
the digital age that had arrived.
And at that point, I became
completely obsessed with the idea to reverse-engineer
those electronic drumbeats and play them live
on an acoustic instrument. And mainly I did it
because I love those beats so much that I was trying to find an opportunity
to kind of consume them physically. So, in the process, I became something
like a musical John Henry. And because I was trying to replicate
a machine that could outperform – that could perform
statistical density and accuracy that was just simply beyond
my human capabilities. So, in other words, to play this music
is actually very difficult. And in the process
to acquire the idiosyncrasies of drum machine programming, I constantly got confronted
with my human limitations. But in the process, I managed to acquire enough
technical understanding, or maybe even more important – stylistical abstraction
that I could create the illusion that I could play like a machine.
So I actually also created
a real expression with a fake, just the other way around this time. And when I passed this threshold,
something interesting happened; the human restriction – or the human element
that was restricting me actually liberated me, and I could add the element of my emotionality
and spontaneity to that genre. And when I first performed this
in front of an audience with my band live, my band NERVE, the response was quite intense, so I had an idea
that I was onto something, and eventually, I figured that something was pointing
to the difference in the creative process between programming
an automated musical performance or performing music live. Because electronic music, to a big extent,
it’s still a premeditated medium, while playing music happens in real time. And when it comes to playing music, improvisation has always been the most
fascinating aspect to me as a performer, and the most rewarding one, too. And improvisation kind of became the key
for my current conclusion, so to say. Drum machines and computers
and all digital media are binary machines or systems, which means they compute tasks
by deciding between "yes" and "no," or, in digital language,
that relates to "0" and "1." Now, when we program
an electronic piece of music or an automated piece of music, then we also enter
a decision-making process, but the speed of those decisions doesn’t really have an outcome
on the quality of the finalized product.
It’s just the faster
we can make those decisions, the more empowered we feel
and the more fun it is to do that, the more in the flow we feel it –
that’s the word. Now, when we play music in real time,
especially when we improvise, that same decision-making process
gets condensed to fractions of seconds and to a degree where we can no longer
compute decisions consciously anymore. Now, when that happens,
we enter that magical zone that could probably best be described
as an out-of-body experience. And that’s the place where it’s possible
to surrender our intentions and let intuition take over. And this is a zone where – it goes beyond "yes" or "no." This is really a place that examines
that distance between "0" and "1," which is a zone that a machine
cannot compute …
Yet. So while we live in a world where digital
technology is driving our evolution, reverse engineering digital culture
has pointed my attention to that difference between "0" and "1,"
or that distance between "0" and "1," which, so far, has gotten me
the closest to comprehend the inexplainable source
of my creativity and human existence. And all of this is what I’m hoping to communicate when I will perform another
short improvisation for you, which is based on digital culture. (Drum improvisation starts) (Drum improvisation ends) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Drums were supposed to be loud. That’s why they were built
so we can communicate to far entities. But drums can also be
quite quiet and romantic.
So I will try to do something like that. (Drumming starts) (Drumming ends) (Applause) Thank you..