Composers creating music entirely by computer do battle at local nightspots

For most of us, laptops are glorified word processors, DVD/CD players and maybe a way to leech free wi-fi connections off coffee shops. For a newer breed of musician, the lightweight computers are heavyweight musical instruments.

LAPTOP BATTLE [V 3.0]

WHAT: Laptop musicians duke it out in three-minute sets. Featuring: Buck Nasty, Fellonious Thump, Silky Johnson, Wayne Kerr, Franklin Mazzeo, Ryan Trudell, Tom Chi, Nogunri, Zapan, Danger Dave, nth808, Nominal I, Turk, Butterfly Beats, Kris Moon, Umami, Nordic Soul, Syzygy, Absolute Madman, Djn

WHEN: Tomorrow, 9 p.m.

WHERE: Chop Suey, 1325 E. Madison St., 206-324-8000

TICKETS: $6 advance at www.brownpapertickets.com or $10 at the door. For more information, go to www.laptopbattle.org or www.fourthcity.net/

Imagine working in a musical medium where every sound -- the zoom of a camera lens or the crinkle of crumpled paper -- can be considered a chord or a note. Welcome to the latest genre of e-music, where musicians aren't limited by what they can extract from traditional instruments, and the whole deal takes place on a portable piece of technology.

The music itself can sound like a down-tempo lullaby, a deliciously bouncy dance groove or a blitzkrieg by angry computers.

"Computers are the future of music," says Zach Huntting, a local artist and laptop composer/performer.

"There's no reason to make a demo anymore; you can record better than CD quality at home. I don't see much out there that a computer can't do."

Of course, the idea of using computers in studios to take previously recorded material and editing it to create new sounds isn't new -- techno and rock artists have been doing that for years. But composing entire pieces using nothing but what's on the hard drive is a whole other deal.


		Joshua Trujillo / P-I
	Kris Moon wows the crowd at Pioneer Square's Temple Billiards with his mixing prowess on the Macintosh iBook. Moon and fellow artists Steven Ford and Zach Huntting came up with the idea of staging laptop battles along the West Coast.

You can create sound samples yourself -- or take them from keyboards like the Roland 808 -- alter and mix them to produce fresh songs, live, on stage. Make that a three-minute piece in a competitive setting and you get the idea of what goes down at a laptop battle, like the one taking place at Capitol Hill's Chop Suey tomorrow night.

Huntting, 28, runs an arts collective called Fourthcity, with 35 members all over the United States, as well as in far-flung locales such as France, Lithuania and Japan.

A couple of years ago, Huntting, along with fellow artists Kris Moon (who Huntting describes as a "sick" laptop performer) and local laptop pioneer Steven Ford cooked up the idea of arranging laptop battles up and down the West Coast.

Huntting, who performs as Zapan, describes his style as "avant-garde mood music, instrumental hip-hop at slightly slower speeds" (for a sample of his music, check out www.fourthcity.net/music/fct014/fct014-4.mp3), and can be found doing his thing around town -- sometimes at the Lower Level on Capitol Hill, other times at Pioneer Square's Deep Down Lounge. This isn't to say laptop music is a total fixture on the nightclub circuit yet. As it stands, Huntting says, the scene is "a mishmash of established musicians and newcomers," meaning its identity is in the process of being established here.

An evolving field

There's been a form of laptop battle happening in Germany for about two or three years, but, from Huntting's description, it's more like a drumming circle or jam session featuring laptops than a traditional battle. Then there's the Laptronica "cage matches" in Chicago, where the laptoppers go up against performers dressed in animal costumes for the greatest amount of audience response.

The Seattle scene, meanwhile, started quietly with Ford, who performs as Bobby Karate and Bruno Pronsato.

"I was the first person to drag a laptop out at shows here about five years ago," says Ford, 32. "But it hasn't really caught on until this year. At my first laptop show in the summer of '99 there was, like, four people there," says Ford.

Even as early as two years ago, when he held a regular laptop gig at the now-defunct downtown club I-Spy, he says it was pretty much a crowd of two: himself and the club manager.

More than 600 people showed up to catch January's laptop battle at Chop Suey.

"I think the community of people you're dealing with is growing," says Ford, who is a resident performer at Queen Anne's Mirabeau Room nightclub, which hosts a laptop night every Monday.

At first glance, this laptop business seems like a bit of a boys club -- certainly not by design. Alethea Eichhorn (aka Butterfly Beats) is among the few women on the local scene, and she's the only female contestant among a total of 20 in tomorrow night's battle. The soft-spoken, self-described computer geek isn't sure why that's the case, but she's certain it'll change.

"Maybe it's something that's really new and maybe as it develops more people from more backgrounds from both genders will emerge to do it," she muses.

What appeals to her most about composing on a laptop is that she can compose without limits. Eichhorn, 27, has been creating laptop music for about two years, as a solo performer and as part of a duo called Beehive.

A self-taught musician and techie (she has a degree in psychology from the University of Washington), Eichhorn started out buying CDs with instrumental samples and moved on to creating her own samples. While most laptop pros scoff at the sample CDs, that's the way most laptop performers learn to experiment with sound.

For Eichhorn, it doesn't so much matter how the music is created, as long as it's honest and expressive.


		Karen Ducey / P-I
	Laptoppers Dan Naspinski (aka Djn), left, and Zach Huntting (Zapan) do a little noodling at Huntting's Capitol Hill apartment.

"I've always been drawn to creative things and to me, this is my voice -- I don't think there is a big difference except for the fact that it's a computer," says Eichhorn. "But they're all instruments to me."

Not just pressing play

While techno or electronic music fans have seen their share of laptops on stage, there's still an element of mystery to the setup.

Usually, with a mixing board or keyboard, the audience can at least see the musician's knob-twiddling. With a laptop, everything is hidden.

"The audience is like, 'I really like the music that's coming out of there, but it looks like they're checking their e-mail up there,' " says Huntting. But he says an audience can tell a live performance by observing the correlation between sounds and the artist's hand movements.

"You can assign sounds to the qwerty keyboard, so you can actually see someone hit a key as you hear a drum sound, for example," he explains. While there's less risk with laptop performances than with playing a live instrument (barring a total system meltdown), there's still an element of excitement to the live format. Plus, Ford says, bands like the Postal Service have made it OK to have a laptop on stage.

"Before, people suspect that the guy is just pressing play," says Ford. Even Beehive, which features Eichhorn's vocals and laptop composition along with guitarist/co-composer David Miller, faced puzzled looks.

"When Dave and I started playing, people didn't know what we were doing, because we mix lap top and rock 'n' roll. And people were like, 'What? You have a laptop out there?' " says Eichhorn.

If puzzled glances -- or lack thereof -- seem an imprecise way to measure the normalcy or popularity of laptop music, then consider the empty clubs of two years ago versus the packed houses of recent months. And a packed house don't lie.

SO YOU WANNA BE A LAPTOP MUSICIAN?

If you have a talent for composition -- playing an instrument and having vocal ability wouldn't hurt, either -- you could be on your way. But first, make sure you have the right stuff. Here's what you'll need:

A good laptop. Macintosh G4s are popular, but a PC will do fine. Anything with 512 megabytes of RAM with a processor at (a minimum of) 2 GHz should give you a smooth start.

You'll need the right software to help you manipulate sounds -- look into programs like Ableton Live, Reason, Fruity Loops, Max/MSP and Reactor.

You can buy CDs with a bunch of different samples or you can get yourself a mike and a mixer and record your own samples.

Get inspired by checking out local laptop nights or listening to artists like Kid 606, Aphex Twin, Twine, Autechre, Boards of Canada and Oval.

More headlines and info from Capitol Hill.