Much like our friend Floating Points (who's coming to Brooklyn next Saturday), these two chose to step back from their laptops and drum machines a bit on this one, instead aiming for a more collaborative experience with numerous singers and instrumentalists.
He was standing behind a set-up with several types of drums: a snare and floor tom, a pair of bongos, and a laptop and drum pad that could be coaxed to produce any number of other percussion sounds.
The opening band, Télépathique, is Brazilian, from Sao Paulo, and played slyly metamorphosing dance music: electro to dance-rock to techno to funk, as Érico Theobaldo moved among turntables, laptops and a drum kit.
He stood near the percussionists with his laptop and electronic drum pad, while a monitor with flashing green lights helped Mr. Slatkin synchronize the instrumental and electronic elements.
Using laptop computers, a drum machine and a mixing board, they played pieces that sounded like madcap contraptions: buzzing, beeping and ratcheting with dizzying syncopation.
A very particular, very millennial breed of simmering downtempo pours through your laptop speakers; muffled drum machine pitter, a few lazy nocturnal synth beams, perhaps an entranced, elliptical vocal sample sourced from self-help tapes, ancient cartoons, Nintendo 64 games, or public-access flotsam.
Your electronics guy should know how to plug the laptop with the drum samples into the amplifier.
It wasn't just the laptops, samplers and electronic drum pads that kept turning up onstage alongside the guitars.
At Glasslands, they turned their studio productions into an exuberant, glowing show, performing parts of songs on the fly — using a sea of laptops, keyboards, MPCs and drum machines, and more — while relying on recorded parts to flesh out the sound.
The protesters' command center (a booth equipped with laptops) was gone, the drums were gone, the protest signs, the pets — everything but the holdouts.
