| The Battle in Seattle part 3 |
[Dec. 2nd, 2007|09:08 pm] |
Battle day was eventful in that it was spent mostly trying to navigate through Seattle in an uncharacteristic blizzard. The snow hit hard right around lunchtime and it didn't really let up all day. This was fun for those of us from the ATL on a conceptual level, but it really just meant that everything moved much more slowly and when that happens, I tend to get flustered.
After an aborted attempt to get into the Science Fiction Museum, we wound up looking for a place to eat. The not-stellar but not-bad Greek pizza we found on Queen Anne would have to suffice. Matt and I were not suprisingly the first to arrive at the venue which was a little room with an ajoining bar that was all underneath a bigger art and music space. It seemed considerably smaller than Chop Suey, the home of last year's battle, but it turned out to be just about the right size.
Kris, the organizer, runs his event with a pretty solid schedule and lots of intentional breaks in the action. This is done in part to facilitate smoke breaks, but it also lets him schedule "showcase" performances by laptop battlers from the past who get more than just three minute blocks to show people what they can do. I like the idea a lot, but it might not ever work in Atlanta unless we could get people to take the set up thing seriously and unless we could get a stage wide enough to set up 8 computers at once. Since all of the battlers were set up at once, they could throw in short (or not-so-short) sets by Vytear, Kris, and Vincent Parker, along with the MC who's name I never really caught.
I drew a 2 for the first round meaning that I was going to play second. I asked "does this mean I'm playing second in the first battle of the first round?" and Kris answered that I was just playing second in the round total. Going in, I had imagined that the format was going to include a round-robin style first two rounds where the six contestants would be split into two groups of three, play each other, and the top guy from each group would be in the final. This was NOT in fact, how the battle was set up.
The first two rounds had no real competitive, head-to-head element to them. Each person picked a number to determine order and then we just played one after another until a break. It kept things moving really quickly, but it was a little confusing after coming from the more head-to-head elimination style tournament that we do in Atlanta (and that they did in Finals past.) This whole format thing would play a big factor later on, but more on that in a bit.
I opened up the battle with my epic metal track (which has no name, by the way.) It was the same opening track I played in Atlanta and it got just about the same response. I mean, the first guy (Cygnus, who competed in last year's final too,) was kind of doing spazzy IDM or something and people were sort of trying to get into it, but you could tell that it wasn't connecting 100%. Then I stepped up in the wizard robe, cranked the new intro to my set with samples from my Black Hole storybook record, and blasted into two and a half minutes of carnage. There was a thunderous kind of uproar and applause and I walked off the stage (and accidentally left Live playing on and on and on.) I knew that track would kill, and it did. I had litterally a dozen or so people stop me after that round and tell me that they loved it. That's always a good sign.
We all waited through the rest of round one and through the break and then subsequent showcase set and I tryed to figure out where the competition was at. At that point, I'd seen everyone play once, but I had really no idea who the frontrunners were. I mean, I should have known that I was ahead by a mile (because I was) but I tend to downplay my own effectiveness as a performer while I'm in the thick of it. I pulled the fourth spot in round two so I figured I had lots of time to get set up.
Since there were no scores released at the end of the first round, no one knew who was officially ahead in the judges tally. This was the first really fatal flaw to this format that I didn't recognize until the whole thing was over. The scoring piece was cool because people didn't have to simply win or lose, and you could get credit for being good even if someone else was just better. I'm not sure specifically how the judging worked--what kind of numeric scale was used or what the categories were or anything like that--from talking with Matt, it sounds like it was kind of nebulous. So going into the second round, I felt like I was in pretty good shape, but there was still NO ONE that had truly been eliminated. As I learned, this was a problem.
I absolutely wanted to rock the Oompa Loompa track when it was most needed, because I think it's honestly an unbeatable thing (unless someone out there is doing something zanier and in over half a dozen battles including two nationals, I haven't seen it) but I also owed it to people to get it on video. My girlfriend hasn't seen it. People at my office were curious. I really wanted to capture it and I knew that the second round was my only GUARANTEED performance left, so I went for it.
There was a slight panic as I took the stage and noticed that the USB adapter on the end of the DDR pad cable was missing, but I ran outside (in my robe and oompa gear) then grabbed my suitcase, tossed through all of it onstage and found the adapter. That turned out to work in my favor because once people saw the DDR pad, they absolutely wanted to see it work. I plugged it all up, fired up GlovePie and went to town. Performing that track is incredibly physically draining but it gets a massive response. Like the first track, when I was done the place erupted. It always makes me smile when I can connect with an audience like that. I know the song is silly and costume is sillier and that it's a big gimmick and it's not a serious song at all but it totally fucking works at entertaining people. Once again, I think I had clearly raised the bar to a point where no one (including me) could jump over it again for the evening. I waited through the rest of the battles and the next showcase and I felt like I was a lock for the final, since almost everyone else was petering out.
Kris tapped me on the shoulder and said "congrats, it's you and Dave Pezzner in the final" and it was as people had told me it would be. In talking with my friends, they all thought Pezzner would be in the final with me because he got the best reaction from the crowd. He definitely had some of the best quality sound of any of the other competitors and he wore a silly outfit and junped around and acted the fool (like me!) so I figured that was fine.
So with my highest energy track gone and my best gimmick gone, I had the blindfold trick left which is not only a tough thing to pull off but also a nod to the world of competitive DJ battles where guys do stuff like that as a big middle finger to their competition. I lost the coin toss so I had to go first, and that was fine. I asked the audience for a scarf and someone threw me a Seattle Supersonics scarf so I tied it around my head and I heard some "oh no he didn't" kind of mumbling. I felt pretty good about that. I then launched into my ode to 8-bit fantasy games (something I call "Dungeon") and it went pretty well. I fat fingered a couple notes and didn't have as much energy as I would have had if I'd been able to see, but I always figured that the blindfold would really sell it. When I was done, again, it was pretty raucous and I walked off stage as Pezzner asked the audience for underwear (since I'd asked for a scarf.) It was a funny way to try and upstage me, but then when NO ONE threw him underwear, it was like DUD. I wanted to oblige so I dug a pair of my dirty drawers out of my suitcase and thre them on top of his soundcard as he was starting be he didn't see that.
I watched Pezzner from the side of the stage he was on and standing four feet from him, I felt like I surely had this competition in the bag. He was playing a track that consisted of four completely mixed wave files and his performance was limited to turning them on or off, adding or removing an effect, and doing jumping jacks and dancing while the computer did it's thing. This was a little insulting to me because it's the worst kind of laptop performance--one where the spectacle is completely independent of the music. You know, people like to see guys with guitars do chicken dances and crazy theatrical stuff, but those guys are always STILL PLAYING THEIR INSTRUMENTS while they are doing that shit. This guy was hitting play, stepping back, and jumping around. Fine.
As can probably be deduced from the tone of this entry, when they called us up to award the trophy, it went to the local hero, Pezzner. Was his set entertaining? Absolutely. While I've never thought that was ALL that mattered in one of these contests, I do appreciate that it's a large part of the equation. Was his music interesting? Sure, it was a good mashup of mindless dance music, done well, and with a lot of crowd-pleasing energy. Was there anything about it that I liked? No, not at all. And that's fine; that's the beauty of a battle with different styles and voices. Still, I was a little dumbfounded that I lost to a guy who was barely interacting with his instrument, and was playing the role of party dj/jester to the local audience more than anything else. Props to him though--he definitely knows how to keep people moving and that counts for something.
So back to that format business--the thing I would point to as my excuse if I wanted to whine about losing. See, without knowing who stood where going into the second battle, everyone had to treat the second round as if they had one loss in a double elimination battle. In a double elimination format, if you're in a position with a win in your pocket, you can take a chance with a lesser track in the second round knowing that you can make up that one loss later if you need to. This encourages risk taking and gives the battle added dynamics. It also means that people can work their way up to their best tracks rather than blow them out at the front end.
I treated the second round as a knock out round because I didn't know any better. Now it could be argued that I should have known that I was a mile ahead after my first track, but again, unless you have that sixth seed in the round, you have no idea what kind of madness someone else is going to unleash. As it turned out, Pezzner and I were probably the front runners all night, with me in the lead until that final battle. Oh well.
What the loss really boils down to is the fact that I didn't employ the right strategy. It's not the format that is the problem--it's the way I approached the format. In a way, I felt like the format let the whole competition down a little bit because I think if you asked anyone in that building, almost every one of them would have told you that one of my tracks was the highlight of the night. And I don't say that to beat my own drum--I literally lost count of how many people told me EXACTLY that. I had lots of Seattle folks tell me 'we're locals but we thought you won.' As I was on the phone with my girlfriend after the battle, sitting on the slushy steps of a closed restaurant watching the snow turn to rain, I was interrupted so many times by people leaving the battle saying "hey man, you were robbed" or something to that effect that I eventually just had to tell Amber I'd call her back.
I had three of the six judges tell me the picked me in the final too, which was weird and kinda got me wondering how the scoring worked. Then, one of the judges who certainly didn't pick me in the final felt the need to explain his decision to me. He talked to me without me asking for him to, about how the order I played my tracks in is what lost it and how if I'd played the Oompa Loompa song in the final, I would have killed him. You know, this is basically the same as asking to see the chef at a restaurant only to tell him how he can improve his recipie. Did I fucking ask for feedback? No. Do I care at all about the reason why some dude thinks I shouldn't have won? No. It's a game, there are parameters and one of those is judges and whatever baggage they bring to the event. I'm happy to go down within the parameters of the event, but I'm gonna go down swinging.
I wasn't too broken up about losing--the prizes would have been nice but superfluous. The trophy was cheesy but fun. The title would have been the best part of it, but you know, I know that I was the best performer there that night and that I just made a miscalculation about the game. This happens in sports, and I'm cool with that. I think people who aren't into sports have a harder time understanding that cause they want to supremacy of art and content to win out over things like arbitrary rules, formats, and judging criteria. I think those are the folks who resisted the laptop battle concept from the beginning in Atlanta, and that's okay. The epilogue to this story is that I still have a successful career with Larvae. I still have tracks that I didn't even play at this battle that kill. I still have chances to work with amazing artists like Shadow Huntaz and to tour and to do all the things I did BEFORE any of this battle business. Would I liked to have won? Sure. Did I need to? You tell me. ;) |
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