Following on Audioriver Festival we caught up with Walsall based electronic music artist MANOID to get the lowdown on his breathtaking live performance over on the mainstage…
For anyone out there who hasn’t heard your sound, what three words would you use to describe it?
Spatial, contrastive, emotional
Where does the name MANOID come from?
The name MANOID is connected with my fascination with sci-fi, robotics and machines. MANOID is a bit huMAN, a bit andrOID. Human emotions in mechanical form.
When you were growing up what did your parents listen to and how has this influence the music you make today?
Not the music my parents listened to, but the fact that they sent me to piano lessons influenced my musical sensitivity. At that time, I felt that the world of music is fascinating and I want to explore it. I still think that the piano is one of the most interesting acoustic instruments.
What is your favourite festival to play at?
My favorite Polish festivals I played at were “Tauron Nowa Muzyka” in Katowice, “Audioriver” in Płock and “Instytut Festiwal” in Modlin.
Tell us about your set at Audioriver.
I like to combine different types of art: video, sculpture, performance, animations. We get new qualities from the combination of different types of artistic expression. At an after party I met Hashimotowiksa girls. I remember they were dancing like crazy. It turned out that they are professional performers who work at the Poznań Dance Theater. They also love techno. The pieces of the puzzle came together. We decided to join forces and present our vision of what the party in 2050 could look like. From our discussions emerged a very dark vision of the future. A world that is falling and people who are not yet able to accept it. Finally a world where we are no longer present, which looks like the party has just ended. That’s how we started working on ‘Afterhuman Afterparty’. We took a wonderful team that made the project great fun: Magdalena Koryntczyk took care of the direction and the texts, the guys from .wju were responsible for the visualisation, the costumes were created by Przemek Podolak from RAG-clothes and Aleksander Prowałański took care of the light. We had the great pleasure to premiere our show on the main stage of Audioriver – the biggest electronic music festival in Poland.
As a live artist do you make your music specifically thinking about how you will perform it or how it will sound on a record?
I separate my studio productions from live performances. In the studio, I like precision, depth, searching for new solutions and experiments. On the stage the most important for me is energy – the one I give and the one I take, my direct influence on the listener and groovy rhythms.
Do you make a track with a label in mind or do you simply follow the creative path?
I don’t think about the label while creating music. I think that making tracks with a label in mind is quite simple (and perhaps also effective). It’s easy to take someone’s sounds and patents. But I value artistic freedom. I don’t impose on myself what the final effect should be. For me, the coolest is the very process of creating and searching for sound, and the results often surprise me.
What has been the biggest ‘pinch me’ moment of your career?
Such a moment was our performance Afterhuman Afterparty at the Audioriver festival. It was a very emotional experience, after all I felt nothing but joy, gratitude and fulfilment.