The possibilities of creating electronic music are so unlimited that they allow even people who do not know how to play any acoustic instrument to become successful authors. However, on the way to the result, the experience with creating sounds plays an essential role, in which the most elementary skills can be acquired by picking up and playing with an instrument known hundreds of years ago, in order to feel how the sound produced by it, vibrating the string or from a limited space affects you. breaking the air flow. British electronic music writer and performer Ryan Lee West aka Rival Consoles from London works with this approach. He has played piano and guitar, but later turned to electronic music. Since 2007, the company Erased Tapes has released several acclaimed albums for Rival Consoles, and each one is different, from the careful groping of the first albums and minimalistic ambient soundscapes without the presence of rhythm instruments to music that is suitable and also made the dance floor vibrate. The musician’s account includes special performances in London Boiler Room and in the museum Tate Modernfestivals Sonar, Moogfest, Mutek, Big Ears, Roskilde and elsewhere. He has composed original music for TV series Black Mirror and Stranger Things.
On Sunday, October 27, Rival Consoles will perform with an audiovisual performance for the first time in a cultural space in Latvia Hansa platform. “I will play eclectic material that has been created in the last ten years – from very light to heavy compositions. Among them will be brand new ones that have not been published yet,” says Ryan Lee West in an interview with KDi.
“I like to evoke different feelings and see if they have a positive effect on auditory perception or, on the contrary, cause anxiety that allows me to stay awake, because sometimes that’s exactly what is needed. Of the instruments, I only play the synthesizer at concerts. Why electronics? First of all, creating playing music alone, you can listen to your ideas all the time and indulge them, unlike working with other musicians – in this situation you also depend on their abilities and attitude, which may not match yours a method of playing an instrument using your hands and muscle memory.When you make electronic music with a synthesizer or computer, you have practically anything you can do and speak to your audience.It’s like being able to speak many languages, but however, keep what you have to say within the limits of understanding for anyone who wants to hear what you are telling him. If the audience is timid, we can encourage them, while if they are full of energy, we can put them back on the ground, trying to achieve balance,” says the artist.
Is it better to listen to your music standing next to the stage or sitting in comfortable chairs?
My music has suited both worlds – both ambient, both techno. I have written a lot of pieces for films that are used to watch sitting down. Music tends to have different functions depending on the places where it is played. Everyone can also choose the most convenient way to let the music affect them.
Do you have to adapt yourself to pre-prepared concert visualizations, or do they allow for improvisation?
I don’t use vocals in my music, it’s very abstract, so we let visualization make it more understandable. On the screen, we try not to adapt to the way the music sounds, but to evoke in the listeners the same feelings that my music could have caused. Manipulating all these sensory systems, allowing their conjured images and landscapes to harmoniously overlap one another in endless layers, you don’t even at the end guess what was there in the beginning, what came later, and surrender to this experience. Of course, the visualizations are not fixed either, and we improvise with them at every concert.
I read in an interview that you are not a perfectionist, so you perceive music and present it to others as a kind of sketches. You also criticized the creation of music with a computer.
By that I mean that when you create music virtually, you can manipulate practically everything, but that’s fine until you start manipulating what you’ve just done with the help of technology. Therefore, relax, thinking that you will be able to correct, polish, delete anything afterwards. However, you can discipline yourself and improve yourself by always trying to live with what you already have, in my case – initial musical sketches, even if it doesn’t seem like such an ideal starting point. You see an imperfection and try not to fix it, but to leave it as it is, by covering it with additional sounds that hide it or maybe even make sense by developing things that would not have happened otherwise.
It has been heard that the band also leaves one other part of the original demos in the studio recordings.
This is understandable, because there are nuances that cannot be repeated. This ability to always adapt to what you’ve just done is best when improvising in concerts, but studio works also sound less alive if you try to control the situation, eliminating anything that doesn’t seem like the right solution at first, and looking for the perfect one to put in its place by simply erasing the previous one. There is a difference whether you find a flower that grew in a meadow or buy one in a store that a person has grown in a greenhouse with the help of chemicals and artificial lighting – and as much as you can.
RIVAL CONSOLES
at the Hansa platform on the 27th X at 19
Tickets Ticket paradises in the network EUR 38
Source: www.diena.lv
