After 20 years as a DJ, Surco combined his love for music production and DJing into improvised live techno performances. He has played at renowned venues globally, including Space Ibiza, Amnesia Ibiza, Beta Nightclub, and other prominent venues in cities such as Berlin, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Miami, and Vancouver. He recently gave workshops at Superbooth and Knobcon and now teaches people online how to perform live with hardware gear. We had a chance to talk to him about how to incorporate our gear and his new courses to learn how to perform live sets with hardware.
Get to know your gear and get organized. So many people have the misconception that buying a piece of gear will buy them out of needing to practice. The reality is that getting to know your gear and practicing is the most important thing. As far as getting organized there is a lot of planning that goes into setting up how you will perform based on your unique skillset, your strengths and weaknesses, your gear, the type of music you want to play, and the way you want to play (preplanned vs improvised).
I think there is real movement toward playing more improvised live performances. As AI gets more and more able to produce tracks and premix DJ sets the inherent value of those things continues to go down while the value of seeing someone make music live in front of a crowd is likely to grow. Software can’t improvise in an interesting way in front of a crowd. The OXI gear is focussed on and facilitates improvised live performance, and goes a long way to support this growth.
I use my instruments as tools to translate the emotions I want to convey through the speakers. For me, live performance is a conversation between humans and machines. I want the gear to ‘say’ things I wouldn’t have thought of, and I want to be able to respond. Creating music live in front of a crowd allows for a unique relationship where I’m translating their energy into the machines, combining it with the machine’s input, and adding in my artistic touch to soundtrack their night and influence their energy to keep the whole cycle going. Being able to quickly and easily make meaningful changes on the fly using the OXI gear has revolutionized how I perform.
My course is called The Hardware Performance System because it is truly an organized system to learn something that many see as unorganized. Creating the courses has encouraged me to break down the how and why of all of the things I do instinctively when I perform in a way that can help others find their own improv happy place. They say that the best way to learn something is to teach someone else. Every person who has participated in my courses has helped me look at things I do in a different way. There is no one way to do things, so hearing other people’s perspective is so important for growth.
Thank you to Surco for taking the time to talk to us about using OXI in his live sets. If you want to take your live sets to the next level, good news!
Follow Surco
https://www.surcolive.com
