Actually. nobody seems to understand the difference between a  DJ set and an electronic live set. The answer always used to be simple: DJs work with records and turntables, live acts work with synthesizers, computers, MIDI-controllers and the like.

The problem with  simple answers is  that they are just not true:  Regular bands like the Beastie Boys have been messing around with tutntables for decades and ambitioned DJ have been extending their sets with loop samplers and bass sequencers for just as long. But that’s hardly new to anybody familiar wity electronic music – much more interesting things have rather silently changed behind the scenes. Not only that more and more DJs go digital (I mean really digital, not just playing CDs on portable -and compared to modern tools- clumsy DA converters called “CD-players”) – but the way they mix, pitch and alter tracks has come to a point where the differences between a state-of-the-art DJ set and a live set are vanishing.

Performing as a live act has been quite a pain the ass for all these years: Either you carried a truckload of rotten complicated, unreliable and expensive equipment with you and performed on old-fashioned front-of-house stages, or ‘cheat’ and do a DJ set from your own, pre-recorded tracks. which was usually the only way you could do a club gig. This has completely changed – modern electronic music software has grown up, left the recording studio and now hangs around at the club from friday to monday. This also means that the ways of producing electronic music are a lot less limited than they were some time ago: “In Ear Surgery” -my just-in-moderation release- is not a collection of stand-alone-tracks as records use to be. It’s one of the many possibilities to play one and the same non-linear electronic live set, recorded during performance and although there still are “tracks” for the listener’s commodity, they rather sort the  release by themes than marking “songs”. The beat, of course, does not stop there anyway.