Leaving the Planet is first of all a band project. It's great it makes us travel a lot and meet great people from all around the world. It was intense since I started to play outside in 2010 and since the I extended to a we and we started doing that together. For me it is a channel of all my technological research in sound, visuals and programming the software and creating the hardware behind it. You could also say Leaving the Planet is an EXTREMELY BIG VVVV AND MAX/MSP PATCH, I just push the buttons. With a MONOME namely, that freaking grid controller that has brought me to patching at all and that is even today giving me headache when I try to adapt to the next gig. Because no gig is the same, actually it could but I think we are pushing all together too much for new audible and visual territories.
So who is we? It's me, David, I played and sometimes still play solo gigs under Leaving the Planet. But it is intended to be a real electronic live perfromance with instruments played live. So it's kicking solo but its burning everything when two or three people are on stage.
My dear band mates are Dorian Butzer and Tzeshi Lei.
Dorian aka Dorian Droid is a great Singer and Guitarist. You can't imagine how great. When you route his Voice and Guitar through a long tailed reverb, add some distortion and make the big stereo space out of it, it's like you are standing on top of a massive mountain and there are explosions all around or something.
And there is Tzeshi who is a great singer as well. She plays a Korg Synthesizer and it's like if you would suddenly get sucked into a deep blue void with that bass going through the sidechain and dual compression rack. Then we loop it and she plays unbelievable melodies for which I not even can find a silly comparisson anymore.
Both are the kind of singers that write constantly very meaningfull and fascinating texts in a little book. Actually dorian book and Tzeshi every paper that she can find. Tzeshi also works on intense Pure Data Patches and Visual works that hopefully flow more into the performance in the future.
With all those gigs on amazing festivals like Live Performance Meeting, NODE and in places like Frankfurt, Rome, Lisboa, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Belgrade, Vienna, Berlin and so on.. it happend that the software is now pretty mature and sophisticated. The visuals run in DX11 and the visual creation workflow is super slim with the new interface of AVActivist, which is how I called the visual backbone of Leaving the Planet. All build in VVVV and will be released soon.
From the Sound side we produced 5 Albums so far from which only one is released. Because it takes always so much time to get settled with the masterings and the album artwork... Yea you know those things.
The first and published is called '2967'.
Then there is:
XYNegativ (which is a solo monome album of me)
Los Alamos (It's a dark anti-war album)
and two more recent ones that do not have a title yet
Leaving the Planet as a project has produced Gigabytes of conceptual video, artworks and performance takes. I like the moment and the time independece of real-time pieces more and do not bother so much to produce the perfect music video. My systems are just creating visuals without end and also no track we play is the same. I have a lot of trouble doing the after work with cutting and time matching sound and visuals or doing any kind of color correction or having time for photoshop or masterings. However I can not complain, this is the stream of information that I wanted to create.
In the end it is about the massage and this is easy to understand. Get the whole picture, think deeply and precicy about our world and the big problems. Don't loose time with distractions! We need every single head to be creative and to work at the combinatoric limit so that we as a species can overcome conflicts, resource problems, polution of the planet, dangerous nuclear technology, extinction of so many species due to ecological disasters and many more problems that we humans have on this planet. We need our nature given brains to work at maximum capacity to solve problems. The massage is also to stay clean and don't smoke away your brain. We have to think fast and precice, every single one of us and especially the young folks.
Yes, thats all that I wanted to say. Follow us on http://www.symbioticcube.com
You can download a lot there. Not just from Leaving the Planet but from other great bands and artists that we have met along the way and publish and promote them there.
