The band played the same song over and over, they sped it up, they slowed it down and they played it every tempo in-between. Through repetition came refinement and they played it perfectly every time. Sometimes, they would take it in turns to embellish certain chords with intricate trills, but only as an in-joke between members of the band. The audience who heard the music only as background noise, failed to notice. The playlist, despite its simplicity, was carefully constructed; the band would watch the crowd from the wings during the build up to the performance and rate them out of five. Each member would score and when everyone had had their turn they would calculate the average. The average would determine where in the song to start and set the tempo to finish the final repetition. Half scores would be rounded down. The higher the average, the faster the final turn; the more the crowd needed a crescendo. Nothing else was left to chance. They wanted to perform as though they were an mp3 on repeat and add nothing more to the room than an iPod docked to a sound system. They wanted to be ignored as an act and be experienced as a ubiquitous sonic event; people should be occupied with other things while they played. They aimed to suffocate the experience of watching a band play live and whenever possible make it a non-event. Shortly after forming they wrote a manifesto of sorts, it was effectively an agenda in three parts, it went like this: we want to be one song on a multi-gigabyte storage device (their words) set to shuffle; we want to be paused at any point; we are a physical download.
The band who play the same song over and over
The band played the same song over and over, they sped it up, they slowed it down and they played it every tempo in-between. Through repetition came refinement and they played it perfectly every time. Sometimes, they would take it in turns to embellish certain chords with intricate trills, but only as an in-joke between members of the band. The audience who heard the music only as background noise, failed to notice. The playlist, despite its simplicity, was carefully constructed; the band would watch the crowd from the wings during the build up to the performance and rate them out of five. Each member would score and when everyone had had their turn they would calculate the average. The average would determine where in the song to start and set the tempo to finish the final repetition. Half scores would be rounded down. The higher the average, the faster the final turn; the more the crowd needed a crescendo. Nothing else was left to chance. They wanted to perform as though they were an mp3 on repeat and add nothing more to the room than an iPod docked to a sound system. They wanted to be ignored as an act and be experienced as a ubiquitous sonic event; people should be occupied with other things while they played. They aimed to suffocate the experience of watching a band play live and whenever possible make it a non-event. Shortly after forming they wrote a manifesto of sorts, it was effectively an agenda in three parts, it went like this: we want to be one song on a multi-gigabyte storage device (their words) set to shuffle; we want to be paused at any point; we are a physical download.