Mochipet has just wrapped up a victorious nationwide tour, which had him on the road since the end of last year.
I'll be broadcasting the recording I made of his set at The Ruby Room in San Diego on the night of the 3rd of April on this week's Best in Show.
Over the years, Mochipet has proven to be an artist that's been difficult to pin down. Starting out in the mid-90s as a laptop idm producer, he's bounced around between breakcore, mashup, hip hop, dubstep, minimal electronic, unclassifiable (Cuti Sadda…) and every other sub-sub-sub-genre of electronic music that you can imagine.
Nowadays (well, for this tour at least), he was blasting tunes that fit most easily in the style of the boombastic rock/synth/techno hybrid sounds of bands like Daft Punk or Chemical Brothers, and always with his idiosyncratic, distinctive style, making extensive use of marimba and his midi guitar with Kaoss pad (or something to that effect). For this tour, he also was accompanied by a live drummer. Super.
Mochipet live at The Ruby Room, San Diego, 3 April 2013.
This'll be different than my usual broadcasts, because neither of these Autechre sets did I record myself. What I did was take a couple board tapes, did some extensive remastering and added a bunch of crowd sounds (subtly, artfully) to make them sound like an actual concert.
One from way back in 1993 (Incunabula, Amber, Anti EP era) and one from New York 2001 (LP5, EP7, Chiastic Slide era).
People don't care about music any more. Although they will watch/listen to just about any thing on YouTube, regardless of video or audio quality.
Case in point- my live recordings of Daedelus from March 2012 and March 2013.
The 2012 (audio only) recording has been available as an audio stream on my Mixcloud page for about three months. It's high quality, professionally recorded, mixed and mastered audio, comparable to any proper live album you've heard over the years. Daedelus himself has promoted the recording on his FB page, and as of today it has just over 50 listens.
The 2013 recording is of the same high quality audio, and even though the songs performed are different than the 2012 show, generally speaking it's the same show. The big difference is that this newer recording is accompanied by the video of the performance as well as the audio. It's up on YouTube, and Daedelus promoted it the exact same way he promoted the Mixcloud recording a year ago, and the video has accumulated over 400 views in 24 hours.
Of course, I don't expect that pace to continue, but it pretty much crystalizes my suggestion that people will check out videos on YouTube much more readily than they'll listen to audio/music without some video to accompany it.
Lesson learned- if you're me and record pretty much nothing but live albums, I wouldn't even bother do all the work to produce the recording without video, because next to nobody will take the time to listen to it. From now on, I'm not going to make any live recordings without video.
Perhaps one day I'll do an experiment where I'll put up the audio on Mixcloud and the video on YouTube of the same show and see what the response is.
Lesson for bands- I see a whole lotta Soundcloud tracks with thousands and thousands of plays, and that's impressive. But it makes me wonder what their play count would be if that same track was a video on YouTube. I make some original music as well, and (if I want anybody to hear it) I don't think I'm gonna consider putting it up anywhere other than YouTube with some video of something, even just a montage of random shots of nothing in particular.
(Unless I actually try to make any money from selling the mp3s, in which case I'll head to Bandcamp, but I think we all know that selling mp3s these days is a laughable proposition.)
If you're interested, here are the Daedelus recordings-
Yes, I know my Mixcloud is flooded with live WMX recordings (here and here and here and here), but this one will be newer than all those with new tunes.
Recorded at the Darkmatter Soundsystem party from the 2nd of March 2013 in Los Angeles.
