1. The Electric One-Man Band

French sociologist Jean-Marc Leveratto (Reference Leveratto2006: 281) uses the term ‘lieu commun de la culture’ to describe archetypes that have been created and popularised through a process of invention, evolution and commodification. These archetypes, once standardised, take on an existence outside of and beyond the bounds of their performances. Since its emergence in the second half of the eighteen century, the one-man band has become a shared frame of reference above and beyond the lone multi-instrumentalists seen in nineteenth-century engravings, early twentieth-century vaudeville acts, and movies such as such as Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) or Pixar’s animated short One Man Band (2005). Through repeated representations in popular culture, the idea of the one-man band has become normalised as one musician (usually male) using a combination of different parts of his body and mechanical devices to simultaneously play several instruments, replicating by himself what would normally be played by a group of musicians. These performers are consistently represented as playing standing up in the street, often wearing a colourful costume, with a bass drum strapped to their back and a guitar or an accordion in their hands. When British super-group Coldplay wanted to include one-man bands in a 2014 music video, this is the type of performer they used (Whitecross Reference Whitecross2014). Though this image is recurrent in popular culture, it is not necessarily reflective of all musicians labelled as one-man bands.

The variety of forms the one-man band can take is remarkable. American artist Hal Rammel states that the one-man band is ‘an ensemble limited only by the mechanical capabilities and imaginative inventiveness of its creator’ (Rammel Reference Rammel1990: 4). Some performers play standing up, similar to the one-man bands described above, others play sitting down, surrounded by their instruments. Despite the name, one-man bands do not always play alone, nor are they always men. The Vermandel family in France, Otto and Barnelli in Italy, and the Puta Madre Brothers in Australia are all examples of groups of one-man bands that play together. Despite the preponderance of male performers, some one-woman bands do exist,Footnote ² notably Hessie Mae Hemphill and Molly Gene’s One Whoaman Band (Harris Reference Harris2012). The lack of one-woman bands is reflective of smaller numbers of female buskers in general (Hankin Reference Hankin2012), and is perhaps partly attributable to the safety concerns associated with performing alone. Harris (Reference Harris2012: 7) echoes this, reminding us of the (usually) solitary nature of the one-man band. Regardless of the type of music or style of performance, the term ‘one-man band’ is used and accepted as an identifier by a multitude of different musicians.

The advent of increasingly affordable and easily available digital and electronic technology since the 1980s has had a noticeable impact on music-making practices. Speaking particularly about one-man bands, Chapman (Reference Chapman2013) credits new digital audio technologies with allowing the sampling, sequencing and multi-tracking that facilitate modern solo music-making. French historian Bertrand Gille developed the idea of a ‘système technique’ in his Reference Gille1978 book Histoire des techniques to describe the interrelation between the development of a technological system (based on a particular type of technology such as stone tools or mechanical power) and the social, economic and political systems which emerge synchronistically. Gille theorised that human history could be divided into a series of successive systèmes technique, each based on a different type of technology. By adopting digital music-making instruments and techniques as part of their performances, one-man bands can be seen as moving from the mechanical système technique present at their emergence with the Industrial Revolution of the end of the eighteenth century to the digital and information système technique of the twenty-first century. Just as mechanical one-man bands take different forms, so too do these electric one-man bands. DJs, laptop artists and loopers are all part of this new musical world.

Chapman describes the way that two musicians, Andrew Bird and Theresa Andersson, create layered instrumental sounds all by themselves. However, he shies away from calling these new performers one-man bands, preferring to use the term ‘live solo multi-instrumentalist’ (2013: 451). The terminology used by Chapman reveals a greater divide present within both the one-man band community and the larger collective imagination. With a laptop and a library of pre-recorded samples, or a microphone and a looping pedal, more and more people are able to reproduce the sound of an entire band by themselves. But are they one-man bands? The key to answering this question may lie less in the technology being used and more in the way performers interact with this technology during their performances.

The idea of performance has been the subject of much work in the humanities since the ‘performative turn’ of the 1970s and 1980s. Through the work of linguists such as John Austin (Reference Austin1975), Richard Bauman (Reference Bauman1977) and Dell Hymes (Reference Hymes1981), anthropologists such as Milton Singer (Reference Singer1972) and Victor Turner (Reference Turner1977, Reference Turner1986), and sociologists such as Erving Goffman (Reference Goffman1959), performance came to be seen as not just a process of enacting structures or texts, but also as a constructive force through which meaning and behaviour could be created. Since then, the study of performance has grown into a field of its own (Schechner Reference Schechner2006) and has been used to expand understanding on subjects such as power (Fabian Reference Fabian1990; Storey Reference Storey1997), gender (Butler Reference Butler1988) and race (Kemp Reference Kemp1998). Within ethnomusicology, performance has been used to examine questions of authenticity (Aubert Reference Aubert2001), authorship (Brackett Reference Brackett1995) and mediatised performances (Auslander Reference Auslander2000), among others.

While performance has received significant academic attention over the years, the idea of spectacle has received considerably less. One of the first to write on the subject, American anthropologist and historian John MacAloon (Reference MacAloon1984) emphasises the important visual component of spectacles, related to the Latin roots of the word spectare ‘to view’ and specere ‘to look at’. However, MacAloon stresses that not every sight is a spectacle. Only those ‘of a certain size and grandeur’ fit the description, notably those that are ‘public displays appealing or intending to appeal to the eye by their mass, proportions, colours or other dramatic qualities’ (1984: 243). Bauman (Reference Bauman1992) separates performance into two categories: performance as doing something, and performance as a special kind of doing something set off from everyday life by the use of recognisable frames. Spectacle falls into this second category. American anthropologist and performer William O. Beeman (Reference Beeman1993) further categorises spectacle within performance by describing it as the presentation to an audience of a symbolic reality in a way that is meant to be entertaining. The symbolic aspect of spectacle was previously noted by MacAloon who stated that spectacle takes the ‘realities of life and defuses them by converting them into appearances’ (1984: 275). Most importantly, spectacle can act as a mediator between audiences and commonly held social values. Spectacles ‘dramatize the central value of a community and present it in sensible form’ (Inomata and Coben, Reference Inomata and Coben2006: 23). In this way, spectacle can serve in a Durkheimian manner to create and maintain central community values.

The one-man band appears to fit easily within these ideas of spectacle. Many performers wear colourful costumes, make-use of non-musical accessories such as puppets or feathers, or adopt other strategies to appear visually enticing and entertain their audiences. French one-man band Rémy Bricka (Reference Bricka2007) paints his instruments white and wears an all-white costume to match, complementing his clothes by releasing live doves and setting off fireworks during his performances. In fact, it could be argued that this visual emphasis of the one-man band takes precedence over the musical aspects of its performance. Canadian one-man band Dave Harris concedes that ‘doing several things at once requires extra concentration and most [one-man bands] would admit that they play better guitar (or whatever) by itself’ (2012: 9). French ethnomusicologist Florence Gétreau remarks that ‘the accumulation of accessories, pushed to its extremes, is inversely proportional to the quality of the musical result’ (2000: 71).Footnote ³

The one-man band has always used technology to assist with playing several instruments at once, either by making new instruments or by adapting existing ones to fit their needs, such as the foot-powered back-mounted bass drum and cymbals which figure prominently in popular representations of the phenomenon. The impact some of these instrumental choices has on an audience is not to be overlooked. In describing the placement of musical bells in his kit, Canadian one-man band Washboard Hank mentions that it is much more appealing to the audience if a musical scale is distributed randomly over his body rather than being arranged linearly in a concentrated space, even if that would be easier to play (Emerson and Emerson Reference Emerson and Emerson2003). In this way, the one-man band can be seen as a type of musical Goldberg machine in which the interest is as much in seeing how the sound is produced as it is actually listening to the musical content. The visual nature of this use of technology highlights the relationship between the performer’s body and the technology being used to produce the music and in so doing contributes strongly to the spectacular effect of the performance.

In a 1988 article, French cognitive musicologist François Delalande (Reference Delalande1988) divides musical gesture into three levels: effective gesture, accompanist gesture and figurative gesture. The first serves in the mechanical production of sound. The second associates with and accompanies the first, engaging the rest of the body in movement that is not necessarily directly related to sound production. The third consists of symbolic gestures on the part of the performer. While almost all professional musicians use most of their bodies for figurative, and to a lesser extent, accompanist gesture, few musicians use more of their body in effective gesture than the one-man band. This effective gesture, showing how the one-man band produces sound, is particularly important in the digital age.

The same electronic and digital technologies which have influenced how music is made have also influenced how music is consumed and the effects it can have on an audience. Performance studies scholar Philip Auslander (Reference Auslander2006) notes that because most people (at least in developed countries) access music through recorded sources, performers are not usually present while their performance is being heard. Such ‘seemingly disembodied performance has been the norm since the popularisation of the phonograph that began in the 1890s’ (2006: 263). Furthermore, the increased popularity of the music video format and use of music within films, television and advertising also means that many of us are used to hearing music in conjunction with visuals that are not necessarily related to the production of the sound we are hearing.

In a 1993 article, New Zealand musical philosopher Stanley Godlovitch lays out his theories on the integrity of musical performance. One essential difference between recorded music and performed music, which calls the integrity of the former into question, is the correlation between perceived input and output by the performer, what Godlovitch terms ‘causal immediacy’: ‘[We] require of any performance that what we hear bears some paradigm causal relation to what the performer causally contributes’ (Godlovitch Reference Godlovitch1993: 580). In the twenty-first century, we are used to hearing recordings where overdubs, editing and mixing play a large role in the final musical product, and most people no longer concern themselves with the causal relationship between what their favourite band played and what they hear on the recording. However, when watching a performance we still expect a measure of coherency. In this way, ‘spectacle is the guarantor of presence and authenticity, whereas laptop performance represents artifice and absence, the alienation and deferment of presence’ (Cascone Reference Cascone2003: 101).

By changing the traditional causal relationship between effective gesture and musical production found in acoustic instruments, electronic and digital music has distanced the role of the body and the human element in its creation. With an electric keyboard, for example, the performer can be in one room and the amplifier in another. The sound produced is split from its source. This is the basis of Canadian composer and theorist R. Muray Schafer’s concept of Schizophonia in which sounds ‘have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1977: 90). This separation of product from source is even more noticeable in digital music. According to W. Andrew Scholss, professor of computer music at the University of Victoria, the cause-and-effect relationship between gesture and musical production has disappeared in the use of computers in live performance to the point where ‘the relationship between gesture and result becomes so blurred as to be often imperceptible’ (Schloss Reference Schloss2003: 239). The movement towards digital creation and the laptop as the genre’s instrument of predilection has de-emphasised the body’s role in music making: ‘Computer based music [dissolved] the embodied relationship the musician previously enjoyed with their instrument [...] raising questions about the role of gesture in musical performance and the value of haptics in successful musical instruments’ (Paine Reference Paine2008: 215). Removing the embodied relationship found between acoustic musicians and their instruments can have an impact on audience reception. If members of ‘the audience are unable to identify the role the performer is playing in the production of the music they hear, they question the authenticity of the action’ (Paine Reference Paine2008: 218).

Less evident interaction between performer and technology is perhaps what has lead to a reluctance to call some solo multi-instrumentalists one-man bands. The use of looping pedals to simultaneously layer musical parts recorded sequentially or the use of pre-recorded samples triggered simultaneously through audio software on a laptop does not always require the same bodily engagement with technology as in older forms of the one-man band. This is not to say, however, that digital or electronic musicians cannot reproduce the same spectacular ethos of the traditional one-man band.

The 2002 performance of Afasia by Spanish digital media performer Marcel.lí Antúnez has been labelled a ‘one-man-multimedia-band’ (Jordà Reference Jordà2002). In Afasia, Antúnez is fitted with a sensor-suit and uses it to control animations, video and music while playing the only human role in the piece. The music is produced by four onstage robots who are each controlled (or ‘played’) by the performer while a sampler, CD player and effects module all controlled by the performer help provide audio support for the performance. Antúnez also controls video samples while a camera fixed to his arm provides live video images. Though the piece follows a set narrative arc, the performer can act and react to what is displayed on the screen behind him, both creating what is seen and responding to it. The system used allows a variety of final forms to emerge, ranging ‘from free audio-visual improvisation to completely pre-recorded sequence playing’ (Jordà Reference Jordà2002).

The name robotcowboyFootnote ⁴ is used by American musician and multimedia artist Dan Wilcox to describe both his ongoing performance project and the stage persona he assumes when performing. The robotcowboy wearable platform features a variety of interfaces such as a digital guitar, a gamepad and a touchpad connected to a lightweight portable computer. All the equipment is worn on the performer’s body. Early incarnations of robotcowboy featured a modified i-mac as a wearable video display, with video output sometimes connected to a projector or other visual system.Footnote ⁵ Currently, robotcowboy is being reworked as robotcowboy 2.0 to take advantage of changes in technology since its debut as well as the evolution of the performer’s ideas and artistic direction.

In perhaps one of the most direct correlations between a digital one-man band and more traditional versions, Canadian musician McRorie performs completely live using two specially made keyboards, piezo sensors on his feet and exo-midi controllers on various bend-points on his body all connected wirelessly to a computer processor. His feet trigger bass and snare sounds, and the keyboards slung over each shoulder allow him to play bass and rhythm parts while his voice either sings vocals or plays lead through a midi vocoder. Recent improvements in his equipment have also allowed him to trigger visual material projected onto screens behind him (Tait Reference Tait2015).

The three artists presented above each arrive at some form of the digital one-man band from different backgrounds. Antúnez considers himself less a musician and more a performance artist. In Afasia he develops different ways to control what is happening on stage while leading the audience through the narrative arc of the play. For Antúnez, Afasia was less about pushing the one-man band envelope and more about continuing his exploration of performance pieces using mechatronics.Footnote ⁶ On a personal level, robotcowboy seeks to add the stage presence and energy of his punk/new wave past to his new interest in computer music, while simultaneously proposing a new paradigm for electronic music, which he believed was suffering from a lack of a true performance aesthetic (Wilcox Reference Wilcox2007). Finally, McRorie is a musician who wanted to keep playing the music he enjoyed, even as band-members left the groups he was in (Tait Reference Tait2015).

2. Technological Relationships

American professor of theology and computer science at St John’s University Noreen Hertzfeld (CBC 2012) believes that one of the defining elements of humanity in a world of technology is our ability and our desire for interaction and relationships between humans. On the surface it appears that the one-man band uses technology to avoid interacting with other people by removing the need for other musicians in his band, as in the case of McRorie. However, to say that the one-man band exists in isolation would be to completely ignore the importance of the audience. The one-man band may be a solitary figure, but, to borrow an idea from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, it is a crowded solitude.Footnote ⁷ Rather than using technology as a way of distancing themselves from this crowd, the one-man band uses an overt relationship with technology to create a sense of spectacle that facilitates making contact with their audience and developing a relationship with them. I believe, in part, that it is this relationship which continues to attract people to the one-man band.

Computer music composer and researcher Kim Cascone believes that audience expectations are shaped by a certain set of performance codes as promoted by mass media and popular culture: ‘[T]he unfamiliar codes used in electronic music performance have prevented audiences from attributing “presence” and “authenticity” to the performer’ (2003: 102). For example, in laptop performances, ‘the standard visual codes disappear into the micro-movements of the performer’s hand and wrist motions, leaving the mainstream audience’s expectations unfulfilled’ (2003: 102). The one-man band’s use of their body provides the spectator with the necessary level of authenticity to appreciate the performance while also serving to meet audience expectations about the performance they are about to see. In a personal conversation with Dan Wilcox in December 2012, he noted that the use of visual displays in his robotcowboy performances served to accentuate or expand the physical movements of his fingers on the controls. By subsuming technological processes within the hidden world of electronics, microchips and computer processors, the spectacular effect of the activation of technology is mostly lost in the digital age. Sound creation process passes from the visual world (mechanical processes and flailing limbs) to the invisible world (digital processes and button pushing). However, the effects of this process on audience perception of causality can be diminished through the visual and spectacular nature of traditional one-man band performances. The full-body approach of the one-man band can also bring the audience and the performer closer together by creating the perception of a shared experience between the two: ‘[V]isual aspects of performance signal that performers are not merely producers of sound but are themselves listeners, highlighting the musical activity as a shared experience between performers and listeners’ (Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Graham and Russo2005: 204). This interactivity with the audience was one of the main reasons that robotcowboy gives for adopting his particular performance style. The surface understanding of this is that the greater mobility and freedom accorded to the performer allows him or her to interact better with the audience. What is not often mentioned is that interactivity is a two-way street. The audience must also respond to the performance they are witnessing. It could be argued that these performers adopted a style similar to the one-man band in order to solicit greater reactions from the audience, allowing for the greater interaction between performer and audience.

Use of technology of one description or another is one of the defining characteristics of humanity, however, as our technological inventions become more complex, so too does our relationship with them. Plastic surgery, replacement body parts and the ever thinning line between technology and the body, the physical self and the virtual self means that the body has shifted from being a source of technology to a location of technology: ‘[P]roductive techniques have moved inwards, to invade, reconstruct and increasingly dominate the very contents of the body’ (Schilling Reference Schilling2005: 173). Though increasingly prevalent, this phenomenon is not new. In his work on the history of leisure, American historian Gary Cross cites Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla, describing employees in early textile mills as slaves, obligated to adapt their movements to those of the machines they work, advancing and retiring with the machine, ‘struggling with it in velocity, and no more able than it to rest’ (Cross Reference Cross1990: 59). This is not far from Victor Fournel’s nineteenth-century description of a Parisian one-man band so enmeshed with its instruments that ‘the slightest movement of the muscles, the smallest tremble of his legs, the least blink of an eye or tremor of the nerves instantly produces the most deplorable cacophony’ (Fournel Reference Fournel1867: 38). The late eighteenth-century one-man band may have presaged the ‘technological body’ by almost 200 years. The body/technology dichotomy present within the one-man band can be seen as a continuation of the traditional nature/culture dichotomy within anthropology. However, an increasingly co-joined relationship between the two could be signalling the end of this division and the creation of what Schilling calls the ‘technological body’. In doing so, the separation between body and technology becomes increasingly artificial, and the claim to studying either one independently becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

On a smaller scale, the integration of body and technology finds pertinence in the age of the smart phone as a constant companion, leading to the prevalence of the term ‘technology addiction’ since the 1990s (McNamee Reference McNamee2014). The advent of ‘smart’ watches and synched fitness/health devices (such as fitbitFootnote ⁸) which read your pulse and monitor certain physiological signs, not to mention the upcoming introduction of technologically enabled smart-jeans (Eadicicco and Weinberger Reference Eadicicco and Weinberger2015), make the combination of body and technology an everyday reality for an increasing amount of people. This conjoined relationship with technology is not always seen in a positive light: ‘Critical theory and science fiction seem to present us with only two possible scenarios: either we become slaves and caretakers to technology, or the human body will be forced to evolve through technological augmentation and genetic manipulation’ (Wilson-Bokowiec and Bokowiec Reference Wilson-Bokowiec and Bokowiec2006: 49).

In the light of this increasing integration between bodies and technology, the one-man band provides us with a model that helps us understand our own use of technology in a digital world. Despite the fact that for many audiences in the twenty-first century, the invisible (almost magical) forces of digital technology are ubiquitous, an understanding of how they work and the ability to exert some type of control over them escape most people. By presenting a positive model of technological integration in which agency remains with the performer, the one-man band serves as a visual metaphor for our increasing interconnectedness with technology while also representing a beacon of hope for those who feel overwhelmed by our increasing dependence on technology without a concomitant understanding of it. At the same time, the bodily presence of the one-man band represents reality. Because we have become accustomed to disembodied performance on recordings, corporeity becomes a stand-in for liveness, particularly in mediatised situations. Spectacle, despite its seeming artifice, helps establish the realness of the performance. The simultaneous nature of the one-man band is a way of asserting the body’s role in the here and now, particularly in the increased presence of an online world which is without time, or faced with the placelessness of the modern world (Augé Reference Augé1992).

3. Spectacular Staying Power

Even with the addition of new variations on the format, such as the digital practices described above, the traditional model of the mechanical one-man band can still be found playing in the streets and onstage today, much as it was doing in at the end of the 1700s. The development of new practices has not replaced or superseded older ones, rather they layer on top of them to create a greater variety of one-man bands. Why has the one-man band survived for all of these years? Why has it not been replaced by something different, or evolved into a different form of performance entirely? Why has the ease of digital music-making not lead to the complete replacement of the mechanical one-man band with the electronic? I believe that the one-man band’s longevity can in part be attributed to its materialisation of our continuously evolving relationship with technology, particularly in the industrial and post-industrial age. By presenting a causal relationship with technology that places the body at the centre of its performances, the one-man band reasserts corporeity and human agency amidst disembodied computer or laptop music and performers, thereby helping meet audience expectations and providing spectators with the authenticity they seek in a performance. Furthermore, by presenting a symbiotic relationship between man and machine in artistic creation, the electric one-man band provides us with a positive model of the body as a site of technology.