M.I.A. Travels The World On The Back Of A Lemur

Fusing the sounds of Dancehall, Grime and musical influences from around the planet, M.I.A. is fast becoming a global superstar. But whether opening for Bjork, playing the world's biggest festivals or touring with her band, M.I.A., attains creative enlightenment with Jazzmutant's Lemur...
M.I.A. (AKA Mathangl Arulpragasam) and her band are becoming as well known for the visual spectacle of their shows as the uncompromising nature of their sound. But it was while opening for Bjork that the band were first introduced to the revolutionary Jazzmutant Lemur multi-touch controller - already a mainstay of Bjork's live shows.
Having immediately decided that Lemur was the controller for them, M.I.A's technical and creative guru Andrew Plourde started integrating the controller into their own live sets - and with just ten days until their next live performance, the pressure was on!
He said: "I had never even touched a Lemur at that point, so it's testament to good design that I was able to put together the programming in so short a time without having to even read the manual!"
It may be early days as far as exploring the Lemur's full potential, but the creative element that Lemur has brought to their live shows has been unparalleled, as Andrew says.
He said: "Previously, the music was played back by the DJ and therefore was a static, stereo mix. But M.I.A. wanted more control over the music - to be able to loop a section or jump from one part of a song to another, to drop tracks in and out and process the elements on the fly.
"So now the Lemur is controlling not only the audio, but the video as well. When a jump is performed to a different section of a song, or a section is looped, the video as well as the audio follow those changes.
"Ultimately M.I.A. is not a static performer! Despite wanting more direct control of the audio and video, the show isn't about her standing at the controller, playing the tracks. The controller needed to be a 'conductor's station' rather than an instrument - she needs to be able to play it, walk away and come back to it later in a song and immediately see what the exact state of play is."
While technically they could have used just about any programmable controller to trigger and play the parts, in order to accommodate the dynamism of the show, they needed something that provided a wealth of visual feedback. Andrew said: "And nothing does that better than the Lemur. We can explicitly label buttons and create animated visual markers so there's no guessing about what-is-what when she runs back to the controller after surfing the crowd!
Further information is available at: www.jazzmutant.com.
(KMcA/JM)