Abstract
We are living in an era where recorded media have reached an incredible density. Whereas the twentieth century was concerned with methods of fixing and storing motion pictures and sound, essentially producing vast media archives, the twenty-first century has thus far been preoccupied with activating remediated archives; uncovering new ways to access and manipulate digital information. Music making in the digital era involves significant amounts of technological mediation, for some this has signalled a radical departure from the idea of living presence; ostensibly threatening the erasure of the body as well as earlier forms of analogue media, often considered synonymous with the physical. Yet it is becoming increasingly evident that analogue sensibilities remain a driving force behind the development of new, hybrid technologies which offer multiple modes of connectivity between the physical and virtual realms.
A technology-centric art form predicated on the reuse of pre-recorded materials DJ-ing can be configured as a creative response to an increasingly mediatised world, to the deluge of information that saturates us on a daily basis. The DJ upsets traditional paradigms of performance practice and as a DJ myself I am confronted by the contradictory meanings that have resulted from the use of recording and reproduction technologies in ‘live’ performance. The live and the recorded are no longer polar opposites but interpenetrate one another and my work in the last four years has been concerned with interrogating the notion of liveness, how recording and reproduction technologies permeate musical practice.
My investigations into this have been carried out through creative practice that has sought to deploy recordings as material with which to improvise and thus to stage a series of encounters between the recorded and the live.
