Guest “Mix”: Stewart Walker Live in Iowa City 4-20-08

In a stroke of good luck for us here at ISM, we are proud to present you with a live set from Stewart Walker from just a few nights ago. You can thank our man in the cornfields Kent aka Chaircrusher for this one, as well as the hosting he does for all of our mixes! Without him none of this would be possible. We’ll let him talk about this one……

The idea of live Techno performances has been problematic pretty much from the start. Techno has a paradox at it’s root — it gets produced outside of real time, yet in application its effects on the listener is supposed to be immediate and visceral. One 7 minute slice of dancefloor heaven often represents hours or days of fine tuning and sequencing. This means that a successful producer’s skillset is concentrated outside of real time as well. A good DJ can find a record and get it in the mix in under a minute, while a producer can spend hours dithering in the studio about a transition between sections of a track. More important, a dance track can involve real time manipulation of several devices — a producer can run out of hands pretty quickly.

There’s a lively, ongoing debate about what constitutes a live performance of techno in the first place. Until a few years ago, a performer had to essentially cart out their whole studio to the venue, or take the expedient route of playing pre-recorded tracks and miming a show to them. *cough* MOBY *cough*. In recent years, though,
Ableton’s Live software has become something of a standard. Live is designed from the ground up for live performance of techno, but it is
only a tool — it makes it easier, but it doesn’t make the resulting music any good. In fact there’s a fair amount of animosity among many
towards laptop performers, because they can be less than exciting to watch.

So the number of people who I regard as compelling live performers of dance music is pretty small. At the top of my short list are Pittsburgh’s own Shawn Rudiman, and the actual topic of this post, Stewart Walker. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been friends with Stewart since the mid 90s — in fact as I write this he’s sleeping in my basement. So to the extent that friendship colors what I write here, it does. Of course, Techno is a pretty small world with close to zero degrees of separation, so anything you read about Techno is usually by someone very close to the subject. Anyways …

Walker has worked very hard at live performance. He has never DJ’ed, which is unusual in this field. His goal has always been to transcend the problems associated with performing techno live, and his method and the quality of his performance have evolved over the years. Famously, when he toured in 2002 with Greg Schiff he was selling ‘No
Laptops’ shirts, something he takes a lot of razzing about, now that he’s begun using Ableton Live. But that is just water under the bridge — maybe now he’ll escape orthopedic damage to his spine since he no longer lugs an MPC2000 and rack sampler with him all over the world.

At any rate, I’m presenting my recording of his live set from Sunday April 20th, at the Picador in Iowa City. Stewart has played here a couple of times before, beginning in 1999, and is a favorite performer among local techno enthusiasts. This show broke a pretty long drought for dance shows in town, so the smallish Sunday night crowd was
comprised entirely of the techno faithful. I had gone to Chicago to pick him up and see him play the day before, and it was amazing how different his Chicago set was from this one. The Chicago set was more melodic and reflective, perhaps because it was at a loft party with, shall we say, less earnest attention on the musical performances being presented. In Chicago, it was as though Stewart was playing for himself and the 10 or 15 people out of 200 really paying attention. In Iowa City, he had 60-odd yelling, tipsy post-rave ravers demanding their techno fix. Consequently the energy level was much higher, and I think you can hear it in his performance.

Download Link

Thanks once again to Stewart and Kent, big ups guys!