Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance

Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance

Winner of the 2015 PMIG Outstanding Publication Award from the Society of Music Theory The DJs and laptop performers of electronic dance music use preexistent elements such as vinyl records and digital samples to create fluid, dynamic performances. These performances are also largely improvised, evolving in response to the demands of a particular situation through interaction with a dancing audience. Within performance, musicians make numerous spontaneous decisions about variables such as which sounds they will play, when they will play them, and how they will be combined with other sounds. Yet the elements that constitute these improvisations are also fixed in certain fundamental ways: performances are fashioned from patterns or tracks recorded beforehand, and in the case of DJ sets, these elements are also physical objects (vinyl records). In Playing with Something That Runs , author Mark J. Butler explores these improvised performances, revealing the ways in which musicians utilize seemingly invariable prerecorded elements to create novel improvisations. Based on extensive interviews with musicians in their studios, as well as in-depth studies of particular mediums of performance, including both DJ and laptop sets, Butler illustrates the ways in which technologies, both material and musical, are used in performance and improvisation in order to make these transformations possible. An illuminating look at the world of popular electronic-music performance, Playing with Something that Runs is an indispensable resource for electronic dance musicians and fans as well as scholars and students of popular music. " Playing with Something That Runs is an immaculate piece of popular musicology, with the potential to become one the cornerstone texts in our discipline. Its interdisciplinary approach provides an incredibly compelling insight into the performance and consumption of live EDM, and the companion website offers a great tool in bringing the discussions of recordings and performances to life through carefully curated audio and video examples." -- Toby Young , Dancecult.net "These reflections do not fail to pose many difficulties to the musical theory: where does the identity of the work lie? Is there a hierarchy between different "versions" of the same "composition"? Why are some compositions not intended to be listened to publicly but only to provide the raw material of improvisation?...What is the relationship between human and technology? In asking these questions, Mark Butler invites us to go beyond many of the common places of musicology that have been settled since the nineteenth century as the objections between product and process, work and performance, composition and improvisation - and many othersâIt shows us that popular electronic music is the current place for an intense widening of the spectrum of possible on the future of musical creation, both in the field of avant-garde and mainstream music." -- Emmanuel Parent, L'Université Rennes 2, Volume! Winner of the 2015 PMIG Outstanding Publication Award from the Society of Music Theory Mark J. Butler is Associate Professor of Music Theory and Cognition at Northwestern University and is the author of Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Indiana University, 2006).