Reconfiguring the live experience
Celtech @ Buddhafield in the city
Up until recently, our live set up with Celtech didn’t really give us the option to rearrange things on the fly on account of the fact that Ed was taking care of both the electronica side of things as well as the drumming, which meant that he had his hands full and wasn’t able to tinker with the laptop at the same time. Although we were super happy with the live sound, we felt like we wanted a bit more flexibility to grow and evolve the arrangements and to create more spontaneity in our live shows. We puzzled over this periodically over the years and, in the absence of an obvious solution, carried on with our tried and tested approach.
Over the last couple of years Celtech has taken a bit of a sabbatical whilst various members of the band have been preoccupied with parenting and various other kinds of stuff, although the question of how to optimise the live set up has continued to surface now and then.
Then, in September 2017 ace DJ and electronica whizz Will Softmore got in touch and expressed an interest in working with us. It was just what we needed to help kick us into gear again and get us going with revamping the live show’s, so we set about overhauling the set in readiness for a show at Buddhafield in the city on Brick Lane in London, our fist gig for a while.
The process turned out to be quite a tricky one, not least because we didn’t actually know which of the band members were going to be available to do the gig until just beforehand. Over the space of a few days I swapped from practicing the set on bass, to guitar and eventually I actually ended up playing the gig on mandolin as it turned out that Daygan wasn’t available!
Anyway, it all came good in the end and we had a wicked gig. With Will at the helm with the synths/electronica we got to experience full onstage flexibility and at times we found ourselves rocking out in the kind of crazy, spontaneity filled jam at our space rock forbears would have been proud of. The Buddhafield crowd seemed to enjoy it too.
So it looks like live electronica is going to become a permanent feature of the the live Celtech set up thanks to the input and inspiration from Will. So huge big up to you Will and your electro know how, you’ve helped catapult Celtech into the next phase of our evolution and we’re loving it!
Kitchen rehearsal with Will
Buddhafield crowd
There are no comments yet, add one below.
Leave a Reply