Mondayjazz - live visuals for fresh beats

Mondayjazz was a collective of creative people releasing mixes of fresh electronic music every Monday. They were also throwing crazy parties and I was making live visuals for those.

They released more than 250 mixes in total during the period of three years and captured music selection from incredible set of names from local and international scenes. Each mix was full of unheard joints, B-Sides, unreleased tracks and other rarities.

I was already doing pre-rendered visuals for other parties and many of Mondayjazz people were my good friends, so I became the VJ for their parties. But this time I wanted visuals to be made live!

Fulgeance

One of the best times we had was with Fulgeance (real name Pierre Troel), a very charismatic musician from France. He had just released his “Chico EP” vinyl which featured the cover made out of many squares, so that became the main theme of the visuals. Some visuals were made from his original artwork, others were filmend by me and some even captured from 1982 classic video game Q*bert .

His signature set-up featured two Akai MPC2000 samplers side by side that he used to play his tracks live. I was using Akai MPD16 MIDI controller for tigerring video clips live, so it was a very memorable experience standing side by side with him with our set-ups and him hitting MPC pads to make sounds and me trying to mimick his moves to play video in sync with the music.

Fulgeance has a signature sound combining heavy synths with crunching, electro-influenced beats and is running French record label called Musique Large which has an impressive backlog of releases in their Bandcamp . He is also a big foodie, and his 2022 release Musique & Boisson came in a form of cassette paired with limited edition bottle of natural wine “Musique & Boisson” by Vincent Wallard.

Peter Digital Orchestra

Another alter ego of Pierre Troel is Peter Digital Orchestra. Using same stage set-up, Pierre was able to radiate very different vibe. Music of Peter Digital Orchestra was more of a dance music with pounding 4x4 beats enhanced by heavy syncopation and mixed with raw, saw-wave based synths. His track “Juicy Lady” was my personal favorite. Mustache, red, white and black colors became the theme of the visuals.

We did an amazing show during the legendary Satta Outside festival in 2008. Satta Outside was incredible festival both in terms of location and the artists they were bringing. It was held in an old yacht club in the port city of Klaipėda. You could see the lights of the city at night and big ships passing by and making “too too” sounds. All this next to the soundtrack of best underground electronic artists from Lithuanian and great selection of musicians from abroad. Images below are taken from a beautiful video about Satta Outside 2008 by Dovydas Augaitis , it reflects very accurately the atmosphere of the festival.

We had our show scheduled for late night, like 1AM or 2AM, but with many things being late we ended up starting around 4AM. It was the second day of the festival and we had a proper party the first night, so I was super tired. I remember sitting by my computer pressing all these pads and fighting with the feeling that I will fall asleep on the controller. I thought I succeeded, but Pierre laughed after the show and told me that there were quite a few moments where my head nodded down and up rapidly. That was one hell of a show!

Dorian Concept

Another amazing artist we did a show with was Dorian Concept, an Austrian composer, music producer and keyboardist. Dorian has released several EPs under Ninja Tune label, toured as a keyboardist for Flying Lotus and collaborated with Cinematic Orchestra. He loved to use the small Korg microKORG synthesizer / vocoder, so this device, alongside flowers became the theme for the visual. Exact reason why flowers were of significance I can’t remember.

It was one of the few parties that had the sponsor, alcoholic drink called Becherovka. It’s a weird drink with lots of cinnamon or something. I was told that the logo of Becherovka has to be in the visuals and was not too happy about that, because at the time we were very proud to be part of the underground scene, and big brand sponsor was not exactly in line with the idealistic values. I did put it in, but also added a hairy leg that kicks the logo out of the screen just at it appears. Some found this hilarious, but others were worried that the sponson might not like it. At that point it was too late to change anything and I ended up showing this scene. I don’t remember if Becherovka ever sponsored another Mondayjazz party, but I personally had a good laugh making the visuals.

Dorian’s skills on microKORG are crazy and he has released multiple videos under Fooling around on Micro Korg series where he shows off his skills, he also has several albums and myriad of EPs on Spotify . Dorian Concept’s Boiler Room live set where he showcases material from his 2014 album “Joined Ends” is also a must see.

Set-up

Before Mondayjazz started I was interested in making live visuals for a while, but didn’t have the right equipment for it. At the time I had only a stationary computer and any real-time manipulation of video was very intensive task requiring lots of computing power.

It all changed when I bought my first MaxBook Pro. It was a 15” model with 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM. It had optical drive, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 ports, things that sound ancient by now. But I had no idea what software to use for real-time video manipulation.

Scratch TV

First thing that I tried was ScratchTV. A small program that was designed to be used with the EJ MIDI Yurntable system. You had to buy a special vinyl record and hardware device that sits between the turntable and your computer and is able to read how fast the vinyl is spinning. This allowed to control the speed of the video using turntable and even scratch the video same way you would do with the sound. For someone who was already fascinated by turntablism that was mind blowing!

I was introduced into this software by Mark Splinter, who was organizing parties and bringing UK artists to Lithuania. I think it was Jeff Metal who brought the whole ScratchTV set-up with him and allowed me to try it out. The EJ Turntable was invented by Justin Kent, who was performer, inventor and enterpreneur, who also happens to have graduated MIT. He called himself an “Experience Jockey” and used his own invention in his shows. Below you can see the whole presentation of the EJ MIDI Turntable by Justin Kent.

It was really nice, but it was pretty expensive and also after fiddling with it for a while I found out that scratching video is pretty limited in practice and it doesn’t have the visual impact that I expected. But the good thing that ScratchTV software had an ability to cue different parts of the video to the keys on your keyboard. And it was optimised for real time video processing so everything was instant. And you could get that software for free. That was all I needed and I started experimenting with it.

Grand VJ

After a while ScratchTV became a bit boring and limited. I wanted the ability to use more videos and switch between them quickly, apply effects and use MIDI controller. Also the business for ScratchTV wasn’t going very well and they were discontinuing the product. That’s when I found software called ArKaos Grand VJ.

ArKaos were one of the pioneers of the VJ software. Started in 1996 in Belgium they started doing live video for shows and Jean Machelle Jarre was one of their clients. This grew into robust software that supports mixing video, adding effects, controlling events with MIDI conntrollers as well as video mapping, kling-net mapping and other robust features.

I initially set it up with my Akai MPD16 controller, but quickly switched to Akai MPD26 controller that had 6 faders and 6 knobs allowing to control effect parameters easier. That stayed as my go to set-up for the rest of my VJ career.

Mondayjazz

Mondayjazz parties were great, but the series of mixes they released was no less impressive. They were able to get most interesting DJs and electronic musicians from the local scene, as well as quite a few rising stars from abroad. At the time the new interesting thing was “beats” music style, quite a short lived but very interesting take on electronic music mostly built on using broken beats with heavy syncopation and mellow synth sounds on top. But mixes were not following any genre rules or limitations. They were energetic, slow, weird, experimental, heavy, classical and everything in between. But always full of rare and hard to find tracks selected with love. You can still listen to all of these mixes on Mondayjazz Mixcoud page or Soundcloud page .

2012 Mondayjazz released their first release and declared themselves as a music label. Mondayjazz Workers #1 was the name for a 10 track compilation, including producers from all around the globe. It was a complete success, as the compilation outspreaded rapidly throughout the most influential music blogs on the world wide web.

Part of why Mondayjazz appreared so professional was very strong visual identity. Every mix had it’s own decoration, kind of the cover image, their website looked beautiful and they were able to actually deliver the mixes on schedule every Monday. That’s quite an achievement for a bunch of creatives that were at the peak of their partying days at the time. I still proudly use the slip-mat with Mondayjazz logo on my home turntable set-up to this day.

Mondayjazz ended up releasing 267 mixes, an incredible amount for people only driven by passion and genuine will to spread the music that they love. As all good things Mondayjazz ended after a few years, but left a very strong footprint in Litnuanian electronic music scene, and it was really nice being a tiny part of it myself.