I mostly work with my music in the sense of an artist sketching; meditations on technique, layout and composition.
In sculptural terms I would refer to 90 percent of my music as maquettes, ideas and models for bigger and actualised works yet to be made.
My music is also the exploration of separating meaning from purpose.
The purpose of my music is to be used as a tool to enhance the experience of dancing by affecting emotional and cerebral states on a club dance floor.
Intrusion of a dominating sound or sounds upon my compositions is a central theme.
I love this juxtaposition of carefully detailed music blighted by a disconnected and invasive force, it’s like throwing a bucket of paint at a finished painting or kicking a TV over, and with modern technology I can hit the undo button and return everything to its to a pristine state in endless variations.
I love working with this dynamic tension between control and breakdown, clarity and distortion, sanity and insanity.
I make no attempt to attribute any meaning to this though, it remains a blank canvas that the audience can freely explore and to which they can contribute their own narrative.
Most of my tracks have nonsensical titles to facilitate this.
My Live Sets.
For any show where I am billed as shane berry (live) I only play compositions I have created, or had have had a hand in creating (such as remixes of other artist’s works).
My live sets are an exhibition/performance of my “sketches” and often include pieces of music recorded only for that show and/or partially completed works; it is always evolving.
My live sets are carefully tailored and can take me anything from one to two weeks to prepare.
I take looped sections of my own prerecorded tracks, samples of audio collected into themes from the internet/media and re-contextualise them in real time in direct relation to the audience’s response and the architectural space we are in.
I also jump around like a maniac, famously out of sync with the beat, and there is no known explanation for the phenomenon.
You have to see it to believe it.
My DJ Sets (Studio Mix Series)
My Studio Mix Series is an exploration of the DJ as curator. It absolves me of any responsibility towards content creation and frees me to mix and match various styles and tracks made by other artists. It is a meditation on selection and montage. The pieces I select are, for the most part, treated like artworks hanging in a gallery space, and whenever possible I aim to give each track time to breathe and come forward, but also aim for a natural and seamless merging of sounds and rhythms so that the DJ set works as a whole piece in and of itself too.
