This is a Blog about an outside event I saw

Since I will most likely be one blog short this semester I will write a little bit about the show I saw over the weekend. The show in question that I saw was by a electronic Musician by the name of Meat Beat Manifesto aka Jack Dangers. The reason I decided to discuss this performance was that it was not played out like most concerts. First off the entire stage area was covered with two giant Projector screens. Then they had three people behind this screen for the performance. First off obviously Jack Dangers was behind there as he is the man behind the music, next there was Lin Farmer who was doing live drums in the center stage area, then there was the man who I would like to discuss, Ben Stokes is the man behind the visuals. Ben has done visuals for almost all Jack Dangers shows and DVD's and other artists including DJ Shadow, and Cut Chemist. Here is a small example of the stage layout so you can have a visual.



The thing that makes these visuals so incredible is that Jack Dangers emphasizes the use of 100's of samples and clips that he uses in his music. The thing that blows me away is Ben Stokes has a visual clip of every single sample used in the music and plays them live with Video DJ software and hardware. It is a surreal experience to be real honest. Seeing all these visuals played out while the music plays with a very large amount of bass. I have seen a couple shows now that have had Ben doing live visuals and every time he blows me away even more... The amount of time and editing and practice it must take to be able to perform this live visual performance is unimaginable. It reminds me a lot of NegativeLands style of performance and they both are quite similar. Negative land tends to use a lot more audio samples and Ben obviously is more visual, but both of their use of samples is very close in nature and I think that over all cluster montage style is something I would really like to mess around with myself. I will end this with some photos and videos of the show for people to get an idea of what I saw.