Christian Kleine has played a very nice live concert at the Kompakt/Ableton Popup Store recently. Everything happening in Ableton Live was projected on the wall behind him. I took the opportunity to film it and I have also asked him a few questions about his live set.
You do not use a single MIDI controller, which these days is quite unusual. Is there a particular reason for this?
I’ve tried over the years, some variants of an IBC-10 control in the early 2000s as a Nord Modular MIDI Controller to a trashy UC-16 I was not happy. I play the computer or the live set as well it gets as an “instrument” – in the broadest sense. It may sound weird, but I’ve always felt distracted from the musical events with a controller. I’d love to have Live’s mixer 1:1 in hardware, however, it is very complex and expensive, given the number of channels. I could imagine to use for example Push or Monome, but both would mean a relatively long period of adjustment. So far I haven’t found the time for it…
Can you tell us something about the synth that you played? How do you integrate it into your live set?
The equipment varies from concert to concert. Here I play a Korg 770, a precursor of the famous MS-20. I play it live, but hardly musical melodies but additions such as filtered and modulated noise as well as ring modulation.
In the video one can see some Max for Live devices. I suspect these are all your own. What exactly do you use them for?
Yes, these are actually all my own creations. Mainly audio effects allow me to alienate, transpose, modulate and time freeze the audio files with e.g. granular algorithms. The latter I use for example to prolong sound samples even though the actual playback (= the clip) is already stopped.
Very handy for musical, flowing transitions!
