
So here's a report from the last live show of 2009, with Ugress and Ninja 9000 at Kafe Edvard, December 19th. It was a cozy musical triumph, a splendid 8-bit evening, an utter judgement on my marketing skills, and a cold technological nightmare. This could be long, therefore:
The short version:
Musically it worked very well, I played both old Ugress tracks in new versions and completely new tracks, and a set with Ninja 9000 material. The N9K stuff was fantastic fun to play live. There wasn't much people, same as last time. I fail at promotion. It didn't matter right there and then, the atmosphere in the cafe was concentrated and appreciative so I think the music and visuals work. Technically though, several vital pieces of equipment broke down before the show, which made the evening into something completely different than planned, I lost a major video outlet, but nobody noticed anything was wrong.
The long story, with gory details:
This was a psycho-bizarre über-hectic week where one day I see my music performed with a full symphonic orchestra in front of a packed, legendary concert hall and the next day I play live with 8-bit blips and blops at a tiny coffee shop in front of a tiny crowd. I guess world domination grows in mysterious ways.
Background
I didn't sleep much during the last week (not complaining though) - I was traveling, working on several production gigs to make ends meet, social evenings with friends and collaborators, and during hotel nights I was wrapping up new Ninja 900 tracks and preparing the live show visuals. In addition to the usual dual video feed, I was working to include a third video feed, a sort of room-projection-mapping thing, with separate monochrome visuals created to animate the room itself. It was supposed to be a visual über-surprise, during the last set, suddenly the room starts moving and animating, synchronized to the music. We did a preproduction test of this last week and it looked absolutely awesome. Using one or more strong, centralized (movable?) projectors with mapping techniques as a lighting mechanism is the future of live music lightning, I am certain.
But not this time it wasn't. Let me illuminate (harr harr):
Breakdowns
First let-down of the evening - the silly sound company providing the PA system managed to deliver the wrong system, not nearly powerful enough. The cafe is a small place but not THAT small, one does wants one's bass to boom. I don't understand how they managed to screw this up. Delivering the wrong system is just not professional at all and we will not be using them again. Thankfully I have a very talented sound guy who managed to squeeze whatever possible out of the system.
Then a second breakdown of the evening; my Jazzmutant Lemur control surface. HORROR! This is a multitouch control surface, where I control everything from custom built setups. If this unit breaks down, the show itself is in no particular danger, I have muted backups in software just-in-case this happens. If I royally screw up, I can always quickly fall back on preproduced material. As you can see from this photo, the brain of my operation (center) is brain-dead.

I have two laptops in sync and several other controllers, so there's always something that works and lets me do the bare minimum of live performance. However, loosing the Lemur means I loose the Headquarters Of Concert Operations, the performance looses the zest of improvisation. (But probably runs more consistent for the audience since I can't screw up so much...) So it's not mission critical, but annoying.
The unit has now been repaired, thanks to very helpful Jazzmutant support, turned out it was the screen cable that had came loose, and you have to disassemble the whole unit with specific tools to reconnect it.
However, the THIRD breakdown was terrible terrible terrible:
I am using a Matrox TripleHead2Go, a crap stupid bastard crap bloody idiot numb-nut crap pathetic stupid worthless little crap device that takes a regular screen signal and splits it in three horizontally. One external monitor on your laptop becomes three individual monitors in the real world. This way I can (COULD) have one laptop feeding three video targets, in utter absolute sync; the wall screen, the monitor cluster and the mentioned room projector.
During development and preproduction it worked just as intended, but during soundcheck at the cafe something was wrong - it wouldn't split the signal as usual. I had no idea what was wrong, where to look for errors, and no time to investigate, I just died inside, realized I would loose my PRECIOUS room projection, and had to find a way around. Even worse, with so little time to prepare I had no backup for this unit not working, meaning ALL video was gone, meaning I not only lost the room, I lost all screens!

I had to re-build the live-set on the spot to use two laptops, running separate video, synchronized with wireless network MIDI, which is pretty tight, but risky (they tend to loose connection) and not optimal for video sync, it drifts and flutters. I hadn't had time to create this backup before-hand, so I actually spent the last hour until concert start with setting up new live-sets, one for the wall screen and one for the monitor cluster.
This is why I didn't have time to set up the live-stream as intended. Then more setbacks, after transferring the cluster set to the other laptop I realized this one didn't have Live 8.1 it had Live 8.0 and the set wasn't backwards compatible so then I had to download and update Live, and the process was finished approximately five minutes before concert start. Thankfully, downloading the Live update takes a while so in that window of http activity I managed to throw up the streaming laptop at least for basic video.
Phew! The show finally started, to my absolute surprise almost on time, and with nothing more breaking down during the whole performance.
Concert
First, I played a set of rather loungy, easy and melodic Ugress tracks, where I mostly improvise and have fun on the keys. There were some old tracks in new production, and also some brand new tracks. Then I played a darker and more energetic set of soundtrack-ish Ugress tracks, where the lack of the Lemur becomes more problematic, since I'm less on the keys and more doing effects and samples.

Then there was a costume shift (true! Like a real pop-star!) and doing a Ninja 9000 set. I was really looking forward to this, I had prepared live versions with my new top secret C64 audio effect, and also the above mentioned room projection. The C64 voice effect (mentioned in the LME prod notes) didn't work as well in a live setting as I hoped, I realize they're more of a studio effect. But the 8-bit sounds and beats really works. I've decided to develop more Ninja 9000 live material.
Attendance
Same as last time, not really stadium sized crowds. I really suck at promotion and marketing. Just like last time people actually come up to me after the show and ask why my live shows are secret, they found out by a coincidence, and not sure if it was public, they were afraid they could not come. I am WTF and they are WTF and the whole marketing thing is WTF.
I have the same problem with album and single releases. I manage to reach attentive fans, but not so much the casual ones or those outside there again. I conclude: Promotion is quite simply something I neither can, should or want to do. I spend unhealthy amounts of time and worry on it, and it doesn't seem to matter anyway, hah. My time is certainly spent better developing music and visuals. If this means I have quality shows with little or no attendance, so be it. I have absolutely no problems with that (except financially of course).
Enough with the silly details of economics and marketing, makes me bored just writing about it! I think my concert series works. The music and visual material presents itself very well, even with half of the setup broken. I push myself to finish and publish a new track for each show, and I produce several new live versions and visuals for each performance. My repertoire is growing. I film each show in HD, amassing great footage. I document with photos. The cafe is very satisfied and wants to secure new dates for continuing the concert series. My tech guy had excellent ideas for improving the sound and lights, next time we'll be renting system from my regular respectable dealer.
Conclusion
After two shows I observe: The concert series is a musical and visual success, and a very smart strategic investment for improving myself and produce new material. But it is a financial failure. This is due to promotion. I don't care about those two things so it doesn't matter anyway, hah.
Regarding the next show, I think we will be skipping dates in January, mostly because it is a tough month for live events, but also I need more time to develop new material and wrap up commitments. We're looking at next show sometime February, not sure what to present, but with a proper system it would be delightful to dish out some dark, blood-drippingly fresh new dub-step from Shadow Of The Beat.
The evening was immortalized by my excellent photo-documentarist Eivind Senneset (photos above). I've also put out some shots on Flickr.