Shadow was rather good last night. Only really being familiar with Endtroducing a lot of the music was new to me, but there was more to recognise than I’d expected. Perhaps it was the liberal use of Blackalicious samples after a summer where they made up a significant chunk of my listening. Or maybe I’ve just absorbed more than I realised. Regardless, the tunes were fantastic, the visuals for the most part spot-on (oh, how I’d love some kit like that for deli) and the bass thumping.
The last few tracks of the main set veered rather close to being appropriate for alternative worship settings (though obviously the whole thing was a little too front-led for that) with the choice of samples and the contrast of natural and urban images and even a CS Lewis quote.
For the opening of the encore he made use of audio-visual samples of drum-lesson-videos to build up his beats, all triggered from the sampler. Would have been nice if he could have mixed in some melodies along with it–not thrilling to listen to–but clever. Though Matt says Hexstatic (self-described “digital lo-fi cutup video breaks) do it better. But then he moved into the closing tracks and all was well again.
The day had previously seen me hacking away at fortran. I got into an annoying place where I’d worked out a really neat algorithm to do what I wanted, but it just kept refusing to work. To give in and use the less elegant algorithms that were working for everyone else was out of the question. I made it work, but I fear that leaves much ground to make up. Which was one of the reasons the afternoon of presentations was rather frustrating.
Other pressures aside, it was fascinating to hear what people I’ve been around regularly for a couple of years now would come up with for freeform presentations. Quite a few surprises. We don’t give each other enough space to talk about our passions uninterrupted.
In general browsing, this has the looks of being rather interesting. If I could just work out what they’re planning to do.