Addressing "legitimacy" in a live electronic performance: The Knife and Matmos

This post serves as a review of two live shows I attended recently - The Knife at Mezzanine on Friday, 2 November; and, Matmos at the Great American Music Hall on Wednesday, 18 October. But it's also an essay about the idea of "legitimacy" in live performances, especially as relates to electronic artists, and a comparison of how these two artists attempted to navigate it - one more successfully than the other.

I'm sometimes asked by friends who are not as obsessed with music as I, why I go to so many live shows. This is usually after I've expressed some displeasure with a show I saw recently, which they've heard me express before - the sound quality was poor, I couldn't hear instrument X, it was like listening to the album only louder. For me there is something potentially electrifying about seeing the music - seeing how it's made, who the people are that made it. I like to watch the guitarist's hands as she pulls beautiful noise out of six strings and a row of pedals. I like to hear the inevitable cracks and arrhythms of the singer's voice. Rarely (given I mostly listen to indie rock... a genre known for its lack of showmanship), there are stage moves or personalities to enhance the music. All of these likes are related to the idea that the musicians are actually creating the music right there, in front of me.

Almost by definition, a live show by an electronic artist is likely to disappoint on these criteria. The singer might well actually sing... but if the only instrument being played is a laptop, it's damn hard to connect the tiny motions to their results; damn hard to imbue somebody hunched over an LCD screen with a personality. I'm overstating the case, obviously - in fact, I think most electronic artists labor under exactly this fear as they plan their live show, that they'll be dismissed as knob twiddlers or (at best) skilled mixers (in the DJ sense).

Obviously this is all needlessly reductive. I've seen plenty of electronic artists deliver great performances. Improvisation becomes more important in this world. And before a "rockist" claims that the machines do all the work of making sure things are properly timed, go see Jamie Lidell weave dense rhythmic sound structures out of nothing but his voice, never missing a beat as he captures one vocalization in a loop and immediately launches into the next. My point is that although this concern about what constitutes "legitimate" performance hangs over electronic artists' heads, there are plenty of examples where they've addressed it head-on.

Matmos' The Rose has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast is one of my favorite albums this year, and by a long shot is their best to date. Most of the criticisms of these guys contend that their music isn't enjoyable without the novelty of the sounds they sample (shit, semen, cigarettes burning flesh), and furthermore that the concepts behind the songs are impenetrable or poorly executed. These critics reveal more about themselves and their state of mind going into the album then they do the music itself; I don't have to know who Valerie Solanas was, or ponder whether Matmos are paying her tribute or mocking her stridency, to find "Tract for Valerie Solanas" hilarious and brilliant. However, there is some weight to the criticism that Matmos are theoretical/conceptual almost to a fault, and I was curious how this tendency would play itself out in their live show.

The stage was absolutely full of equipment - a piano with lid open and propped up, all manner of percussion, guitars, keyboards, and Drew Daniel's intimidating stack of metal and plastic. There were no fewer than four laptops on stage. The guys were accompanied by three men who beat on guitars, hammered roses to piles of petals on the drums, played bongos, and otherwise generated whatever sounds a given song required. "Solanas" was the first song, and we were treated to a particularly strident and dramatic reading of more of the text by a woman friend of theirs that only increased my awareness of how ridiculous and limited it is. No way is this song meant to be a tribute! Drew busied himself throughout the show between his keyboards and laptops, while M.C. bounced between a keyboard and the piano.

Matmos worked hard to make the show a "performance." A couple of the pieces were accompanied by M.C. doing/creating "live art." There was a completely impenetrable improv piece that involved burning holes into a pillow that was stuffed into a wooden box and capturing the smoke in a thin glass vaccuum tube. (At least I think this is what they were doing - I wasn't close enough to see and relied on the film of it they were projecting to interpret.) M.C. spent a couple of (again) improv pieces either banging on the piano keys or directly plucking the wires inside. Probably most noteworthy, M.C. duct taped an electric clipper to his microphone, and while Drew cued up the wall of wind-tunnel noise that is "Germs Burn for Darby Crash," we got to listen to the hum of the clipper while M.C. shaved Drew's head down to a floppy mohawk. We were needlessly assured beforehand that "what follows is completely staged."

I admit this was all mildly interesting, but it wasn't necessarily entertaining or (here comes that word again) penetrable. Matmos seemed almost not to trust the beauty of their music in its own right, or maybe they really are more caught up in whatever theretical/conceptual framework they've created around it. Frankly, the three best songs of the night were the ones that involved the least performance. In all three cases, the sheer genius and beauty of Drew's programming were sonically front and center. Nor is he simply a knob twiddler... it took me most of the show to figure out that he had one of his keyboards programmed with a variety of squelches, bangs, squeaks, etc. and he was both expertly and sorta randomly hitting those keys throughout the show to add that unsettling layer of "found sound" that can make Matmos so engaging. "Valerie Solanas" was just as hilarious live as on CD. "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein" was downright amazing - not only did we get Drew's programming at its best, but the visual accompaniment actually worked for this one as the "extra" musicians pounded dozens of roses into piles of petals while M.C. shook a small rattle containing (we can only presume) teeth. The highlight of the night was a seriously improvised take on "Rag for William S. Burroughs." Gone was the narrative structure of the song (no gunshot); instead they started out with the clattering typewriters from the CD version, which slowly turned into a wall of percussion (both struck and synthesized) that kept shifting and turning and building. Overall, these high points balanced out the long (and frankly, boring - something Matmos should never be!) improv pieces. I wouldn't have missed this show for anything, but I might be hesitant to go see them again.

I'd had my expectations for The Knife's live show raised by Pitchfork's Amy Phillips, who described it as "kinda revelatory" and discussed some of the same "legitimacy" issues that I am here. (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/2006/11/2 and scroll down a bit - worth checking out for the pictures if nothing else). Well, I don't know about "revelatory," but the show was damn entertaining. The Knife deal with the issue of "legitimate" live performance by basically ignoring it. Their show was all weird/creepy theatre... glowing orange ski masks (Frank the rabbit from Donnie Darko came immediately to mind; they also resembled walking jack-o-lanterns), abstract/mildly disturbing visuals projected onto screens both behind and in front of them, and a large cloth balloon to the left of the stage onto which they projected strangely distorted faces that kept turning into a grinning skull. Karin actually did sing (and her vocals weren't as multitracked as on the album; this did not prevent "The Captain" or "Silent Shout" from being chilling), but they made no pretense that any of the music was being "played." Instead, Olaf goofily danced in front of a (needless?) bank of equipment, on which he occasionally hammered with two giant glowing orange sticks but again didn't even pretend or attempt to be in beat with the music. And y'know what? It worked. Two weeks later "We Share Our Mother's Health" came up on my playlist and my roommate shouted from his room, "Isn't that the song where he had the big glowing sticks?" Yep, that image is pretty much stuck in my head too.

The more I've thought about it since, the more canny I think all of this was on the part of the Dreijer siblings. Let's not pull punches - musically The Knife aren't that distinctive. The only characteristics that separate them from any other house/trance act are the creepy vaguely-Asian tonality, and especially the way multitracking the shit out of Kerin's vocals can make her sound like a horde of banshees, or a pissed-off demon, or the Scandinavian Ice Goddess. If they had attempted to "play it straight," the show would have been pretty boring. But the visuals enhanced the mood of the music, and gave the audience something on which to focus besides thinking, "man, this sounds just like the CD."

And for what it's worth - it didn't sound just like the CD. The remix of "Marble House" that they played trumps the hell out of the album version; they got rid of that annoying faux-Bavarian bounce in the verses but kept the momentum of the choruses. Hell, I even found myself liking "Forest Families," a song I can barely make it through on the album. Sometimes the projected images were a bit distracting (I can't listen to "Like a Pen" now without seeing that strange lumpen humanoid figure from the video with his pencil), especially when they were even slightly non-abstract. But the rotating and increasingly dense "spider web" from "Silent Shout" and especially the... well, what I can only describe as glowing rain drops slowly sliding down a window (which I think accompanied "From Off to On" but I can't remember now) - these managed to enhance the music without competing with it.

Best of all.... none of it meant anything. It was simply entertaining and occasionally abstractly compelling, an approach from which I think Matmos could have benefitted.

So, ratings for these shows:

Matmos: 3 out of 5

The Knife: 4 out of 5