for reasons you might imagine, i’ve recently been scouring youtube to find examples of how musicians who are more or less chained to their less-than-sexy hardware (ie laptops & things with buttons) translate what they do on to the stage.. some preliminary research that i thought you might enjoy:

Daedelus

Jamie Lidell

Matmos

assessing these vids from a technical perspective (ie what gear are they using, how much stuff do they need/use) is one thing, but trying to gauge how successful they are in engaging their audience is pretty hard unless you are actually there. but i can’t see how anyone could fail to be completely enraptured in jamie lidell’s shtick. the things he has here that others sometimes don’t: a) the element of risk, people love to watch something that could fall apart at any moment; b) an ingenious innovative approach and c) most importantly, the human element - not only is he engaged vocally (beatboxing & singing - and its just an honest unavoidable truth about music that people are more ‘into’ things that feature the human voice than things that contain no identifiable ‘human noises’) but he is also projected as a giant on to the screen behind him. you can’t really escape his performance when its that large. so even though in some ways his performance is the most abstract of the three, its easily the most engaging, largely because of this ‘human element’ (i think)

research continues…