Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett) = amazing!

Tuesday night I went to see The Mountain Goats perform at Webster Hall with my sister. I had heard that their opening act, Final Fantasy, was supposed to be good, but I didn't have any expectations. To my surprise I ended up enjoying Final Fantasy, aka Owen Pallett, more that I enjoyed The Mountain Goats!

Pallett uses technology to add depth and layers to his music. I am not a musician, and I don't know anything about the technology he uses, or how common this certain type of technology is amongst musicians these days. This was the first time I've been exposed to it, and I was blown away. The way the technology appears to work is that Pallett hooks his Violin up to a recording device; he then records bars of music he plays live and loops those sounds repeatedly to create a backround for the new live music to layer on top of, etc. etc.

To see an example click below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_nw7bODiQ4


Normally when I think of technology being used as a tool in music, I think of it as a tool that most often makes the musician's life easier. It was apparent in watching Pallett, however, that this use of technology takes an incredibly sensitive musical ear. To be able to keep your ear tuned in to all those different layers going on at once, and then creating new music to add on top of it seems extremely difficult. (Not to imply that other forms of music technology do not take phenomenal skill and talent...)

I think I just mean that sometimes when I think of an artist using technology in performance, I think of Britney Spears or Madonna using technology to improve their vocals or even lip sync their songs. This technology, is clearly at the opposite end of that spectrum, challenging the artist to keep his ear in tune with many different versions of his own music being recorded and played back simultaneously, and layering these variances on top of one another multiple times, all the while rhythmically are hamoniously complimenting each other. Wow, even trying to explain the process is confusing, I can't imagine actually trying to tackle it all, live, in front of hundreds of people, with out any room for human error...

In other words, I am in awe.