Loved this event. As gek says, it brilliantly avoided the whole boring bloke with laptop problem, by integrating the whole experience with visuals, and using a fantastic space.
I enjoyed how the 3 different performances showed different strategies for presenting audio-visual experiences. In the first piece, the relation between aural and visual was such that the visual informed the music. The second turned this relation on its head, with the music as the stimulus, to which the visuals then responded. And finally Ikeda has the visuals and music on an equal level, each representing the same ideas, neither one leading the other, compete integration.
Whilst the monolake stuff was fun, i'd expect it most appealed for those familiar with sequencers. It probably would've been a bit boring otherwise. The music was nice enough (enjoyed the sub rumblings), but nothing particularly stunning, and it didn't move around too much. And, as i say, you could probably only really enjoy the visuals from a technical point of view.
I found myself enjoying the Alva Noto piece immensely. I suspect those that left to go to the bar didn't really put in the necessary effort. Because you could have easily thought that it wasn't much more than some dude playing some fairly obvious noisy ambient with the visuals provided by Windows Media Player's Visualiser thing, if you didn't focus clearely enough with it (I suspect if i'd have had a few beers, this would have been quite difficult). To me, it became clear from the off that to really appreciate this you had to delve into the visuals on display, focus on them intently, and to try and discover the relations between the music and visualisation. No doubt this one on for the more right-brained among us. Discovering these relations fascinated me, and importantly, enhanced the music significantly, allowing a greater clarity of perception and involvement with each aspect of the music, since each aspect controlled a different spacial function.
As the final massive drone chord grew, the hiss and noise served to further hide and distort the geometry of the underlying tones, and as it the decibels grew, the amplitude of the visual dance grew beyond the scope of the screen. As my stare was refocused outside of the screen, I suddenly became aware of the hall we were in, the light dancing in flickers on the walls of this immense cavern. This gloriously brought together the whole experience - achingly beautiful immense drone chord, obscured by noise, explained by visuals, pressed into your body by sub-bass - encouraging a huge grin on my face, and an ecstacy-style serotonin rush.
Yeah, loved that.
Ikeda was wonderful too, although less emotional, in that sense. But it did have quite sense of humour. The "database dance" gek refers to was brilliant - the data search jolted and paused on an off-beat rnb snare click, waited, and then continued its dance. The only real problem with Ikeda is that there was probably too much information going on to really understand any of it properly - because the music and visuals weren't perfectly synched in some mathematical relation, but rather part of one and the same machine, worked away independently. That's no bad thing though, just different.