All My Time: Experimental Subversions of Livestreamed Performance During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had spread internationally, resulting in governments shutting down concert halls, theatres, and other performance spaces. In this environment, the livestreamed performance flourished, with many musicians embracing the medium, performing to online audiences from their own homes via a variety of social media platforms. Whereas many major performing arts organisations created livestreams that attempted to emulate existing paradigms of concert films, many experimental musicians found ways of subverting these conventions, creating new works that could only have been created during these lockdowns. This article gives an overview of these experimental approaches, documenting the major types of ‘lockdown music’ observed across the international experimental music scene, and exploring their play with the relationships between sound and vision, and with the perception of online liveness. The article then examines a particular case study co-created by the author and composer Damian Barbeler. All My Time is an interdisciplinary work that draws on many of these games of diegesis and syncresis. The pianist duets with an unseen pianist in another country, household appliances become chamber partners with synthesisers, gin bottles are transformed into complex percussion instruments: image and sound seem incompatible, but the audience cannot tell which is live. By documenting the important body of work created during 2020–2021, the article explores how these online performances have expanded the possibilities of interdisciplinary music and the experience of liveness online, forming a basis for a continuing examination of the long-term legacy of ‘lockdown music’.