With LAL, IamRobotandProud, Isabelle Noel, Repair, Tone Cabinet,
iNSiDEaMiND and visuals by Suedath. Fri, June 27. Gladstone Hotel
Ballroom, 1214 Queen W. 8pm. $1.
I’ve never wanted to pick up a guitar. (Maybe because my childhood instructor tried to permanently correct my “evil” southpaw. Not a Hendrix fan, I guess.) The drums — or maybe just the drummer jokes — have held no allure. And despite a love for all things synth, keyboards of all persuasions have never tinkled under my touch. But last month while attending Mutek in Montreal, I was drawn to a shiny new instrument on display like a moth to a neon flame. Within minutes, I was creating bleeps and loops by pushing bouncing, pulsing buttons and intuitively playing (admittedly in the loosest sense) the Tenori-On.
Described by its makers as a “new digital music instrument for the 21st century,” the Tenori-On was designed by Japanese media artist Toshio Iwai for Yamaha. Its 16 x 16 matrix of LED buttons encased in an aluminum square is mesmerizing, like some kind Lite-Brite crossed with a keytar. So why should non-gearheads care about this any more than the latest gizmos arriving daily at Steve’s Music? Because with its radical new design, the Tenori-On may ultimately produce innovations in electronic music that change the sound of our late-night listening.
Shaw-Han Liem, a.k.a. IamRobotandProud, was one of the first Canadians to use the synth. He will perform alongside Repair, LAL and others at Tenori-On’s Toronto launch this Friday at the Gladstone. “I had known about Toshio Iwai from his videogame Electroplankton and his installations and I was following the development of this new instrument, so some mutual friends hooked me up with a demo,” he remembers. “When you first pick it up, it’s hard to make it sound ‘wrong.’ The visuals guide you and because the musical logic is built in, anything you ‘draw’ will sound OK.”
If that sounds like recipe for bad-band disaster, rest assured the $1,200 price tag will keep the Tenori-On solely in the hand of serious musos for a while. (Although it would make a fun piece of furniture for Japanese design nuts, too.)
The instrument is fun for audience as well as player. It’s transparent and its lights flash on both sides; thus, holding it up allows others to visualize the sounds being created, like watching guitarists swing their arms before striking a dramatic chord. While it won’t single-handedly sound a death knell for all software-based performance, it may finally put to rest the old joke about electronic musicians merely “checking their emails” on stage.
“The laptop computer was not designed with music performance in mind,” Liem says. “The keys are small and fragile and hard to see in the dark. Plus the bottom line is that performing music is supposed to be fun. It’s not supposed to be like sitting at work doing a spreadsheet.”
Liem notes the instrument is “genre agnostic” — and so far it has attracted not only those working primarily in electronics such as IamRobotandProud, Four Tet and The Books, but also more experimental rockers To Rococo Rot, Battles and Jim O’Rourke, as well as Björk programmer Damian Taylor. It’s not the only product on the market exploring the interface of sound and vision — check out clips of Monome and ReacTable on Youtube — but with a heavy global marketing push from Yamaha, the Tenori-On may one day join the list of music machines that become part of the general lexicon, making it the next Theramin, Fairlight or Moog. Of course, that’s not up to its makers, but the musicians who will use it.
“When you play the piano you have muscle memory, a bag-of-tricks kind of thing,” Liem says. “I feel the Tenori-On breaks you out of that. If you’re improvising, it forces you to think differently. I do hope it inspires new kinds of music. What would be the point if it was just another way to make the same sounds?”