Mincemeat or Tenspeed

In my time both going to local shows in the Twin Cities and traveling across the country making music, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a Philadelphia-based solo electronics/noise/dance (emphasis on the last genre tag but accomplishing that goal through ingenious use of the other two) music performer by the name of Mincemeat or Tenspeed twice. The first time was in an upstairs illegal venue in Oakland, full of kids who frantically got their party on in a seething mass before the Bay Area Rail stopped running in the AM and left them stranded until the next morning. Then, after forgetting what his performing moniker was, I saw him towards the end of a ridiculous nine-band bill, which ran the gamut of acts from shambolic folk to hip-hop to dub-noise, at the Hexagon Bar in Minneapolis. Subsequently that night, I was hit between the eyes by the fact that I’d seen him before, the euphoria upon my recognition of him (small world, eh?) being lifted even further by his triumphant and exhilirating pieces, which caused the assembled music-weary crowd by night’s end to forget the last 2.5 hours and move about his rig in front of the stage.

I found this description of his approach and work online:

[f]or those unfamiliar, Mincemeat or Tenspeed (yes, thats one band, one name) does NOT use any drummachines, sequencers, samplers, computers, etc to make his beats. Instead, he uses an intricate and delicately balanced series of gated mixer-feedback loops to create intense rhythms with a texture unlike any other type of beats you will ever hear. Highly recommended for anyone interested in cutting edge techniques for making hardcore electronic music.

And, although the videos I’ve found on YouTube of him don’t do his live performance all that much justice, on account of the sorry state of widely-available videorecording devices being very easily overdriven to the point of erasing the kind of nuance that makes someone like MoT pretty amazing on a couple perceptual levels, here’s a short clip of him mid-show:



I thought him especially relevant to this course due to his employment of handheld, mostly-battery-operated effects pedals and a few mixers, taking basic building blocks of sound through a painstaking process and achieving similar results to artists who would require more traditional means of reproducing sound.