Aha! I was wondering when my crafty flawed deliberately nipple tweaking OP would bring you out of the woodwork Duncan
Of course, you're completely correct, but I'll never admit to that publicly on a forum.
Crap, I just did, & in my last post too - dammit!!!
You've always struck me as an open-minded chap. The picture is an extreme example, I admit!
I can see why people don't understand what an electronic musician does. I was thinking the other day about how keyboard players have a hard time being taken seriously, partly because of the difficulty of seeing what is physically happening. The same is true of a musician with a laptop. The audience often has no idea what is happening behind the screen.
In most forms of music, you can clearly see the performer behind their instrument and see the majority of their movements. Guitarists, drummers, bass players, trombonists, violinist, contra-bassoonists have a physical presence from their movements alone. Somebody working with a laptop doesn't have that presence - neither does somebody working with a laptop, a pair of decks, a mixing desk and an effects rack. That lack of physical presence is often mistaken for 'doing nothing' when in actual fact, a good musician of any type is constantly performing.
Now, I'm not talking about the people that sell themselves as 'DJs' and push a button on an iPod. There is no musical involvement in what they're doing. That's where a lot of the confusion lies, I think (although there's an interesting aesthetic argument that I don't want to approach now). People that aren't informed with regards to electronic music confuse the guy that presses a button on their iPod with the guy that is actually working incredibly hard to manipulate sound behind a laptop - because to an audience it might
appear to be the same thing.
In
some cases (and I cite myself as an example here when I've performed electronic music), the majority of the work is done in the studio and brought to the performance fully-formed. I wrote a piece once that relied on a cassette player and computer programme to do all the 'performance' for me. It took me a
long time to actually write the music but the performance was simply pushing a few buttons, rewinding a tape and pressing 'go'. That piece was an installation work. Other pieces have deliberately avoided 'performance' from myself as a reaction against what I saw as 'over-performance' in some electronic fields (again, I could go on but I won't). Those pieces
did just involve me pressing 'play' but I had spent hours beforehand preparing the presentation and it was clear what my artistic intentions were.
So, there's a fine line sometimes.