Live Music Review: Doubledown Tandino @ Pixel Hill

Second Life Live Music Review
Written by Enniv Zarf (RL: Paul Kwo)
Metaverse Music
Doubledown Tandino
Pixel Hill
3.5 stars out of 5 stars

Finally I got a little bit of time to sneak in a review. I have been so swamped with concert and everything else. I even got a call from my real life acting manager for a last minute audition for a national commercial that I just got back from. I was originally planning a full day of reviews to make up a little bit of a slower weekend. Though I still got a few done over the weekend. Really I haven't stopped working every waking hour of my life for the last couple of weeks. Well I thought I'd stop by a live music concert and review it before I get to my concert. I haven't even had lunch yet today! I'm such a workaholic.

Ok I was a little confused going into this concert cause I am not sure if I would consider this to be live music. It's great that at least Doubledown Tandino did explain what he's doing and so I guess technically it could be considered live music. Even if it isn't, this is Metaverse Music, not Metaverse Live Music, so it's ok to occasionally talk about the other non-live music events here too. Though the main focus of course is live. But still I'll review it as live and original since he isn't just playing all prerecorded tracks and just purely DJing over it. Who can say a computer isn't a musical instrument. I've seen even virtual instruments that only exists inside Second Life as performed by the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. If it's not prerecorded in its entirety and requires some live elements like pushing of buttons throughout the performance that can change the music, then it's live music. See, I'm not a purist.

Doubledown Tandino does all electronica and fusion music of mostly covers, but some originals according to his notice. But I haven't heard any. But he doesn't really play an instrument professionally according to him either. He basically mixes and mangles in beats and everything else electronically. But that's still requires a great amount of skills to do well and he does them pretty well. He does have a good feel of beats and how to mix and vary sounds and loops.

Doubledown, aka DD, performed for the art of...

...ByrneDarkly Cazalet who's also an artist and musician and DD's music really is perfect for Cazalet's art. They are heavy pop culture inspired with music being a part of it. There were a feeling of goth and grunge in the art works but yet it's more fantastical then anything. Think Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. So the darker, psychedelic rock type mixes like of Jim Morrison of DD's were just fitting to the music. I really do like how more and more musicians and artists are really hooking up together and connecting here. I do that a lot. I absolutely love to improvise to art works. I think inherently that music and art is directly connected. I hear music when I look at a piece of art, and I see art when I listen to a piece of music. To me it's crossed, and not isolated.

It's a bit hard to review this kind of music since there's a lot of uses of loops and other elements so it's hard to tell how much of the mix was really just recorded and what's actually live. But what I find fascinating about DD's sound is that he morphes his soundscapes from one to another fluidly and often to very distant places.

He does explore a lot of very diverse types of music to remix and perform. It's actually very interesting to hear what he does with these classics that we know, even things like Christmas classics and other familiar sound clips and then mixing them together is actually very intriguing to the ears. In a way it's almost like a glimpse into his stream of consciousness. It actually reminds me of the concept of George Crumb's music where there are these random quotes in his music. It's kind of how it feels like walking in our lives in a surreal manner. The disjunct of music fragments and sound clips that we hear moving from one place to another, or surfing the radio station mixed in with the sounds of everyone that's around.

I don't know if DD is even thinking any of the stream of consciousness that I am talking about. It doesn't matter too much since it's really just about the music that he's performing and how we all take it. I am sure many of you don't care about any of the philosophical aspects of music that I'm talking about and only cares about whether his sound is something you can groove to. I can groove to it. I think DD has a great sense of pacing and sound colors in his head and dose a fantastic job melting them together into a new mix. Derivative music is still great music and DD does a fantastic job. Now I would love to hear him mix some music by Second Life musicians.