TV Musical manoeuvres from a 'Lork'

SMALL PRINT:IF YOU'RE looking for slightly different orchestral manoeuvres than you may be used to, this Thursday, the Irish Composers Collective presents the debut performance of the Dublin Laptop Orchestra at the National Concert Hall.

New compositions, skewed versions of existing ones and improvisation that stretches the boundaries of electronic music are the motivations of this group of musicians, who set up the Laptop Orchestra (or “Lork”) just a few months ago with Arts Council funding from the Deis Fund for traditional arts.

Alex Dowling, who co-founded the orchestra with Princeton professor and Princeton Laptop Orchestra creator Dan Trueman, says it’s a way of transforming the live experience of electronic music.

“There’s the cliche about watching people checking their emails [at electronic music gigs]. The whole point of it is trying to get away from that, and bring an element of physicality.”

In order to do this, the “orchestra” incorporates other instruments separate to their computers, and various controllers to make things visually interesting.

“We use a golf controller from an Xbox to manipulate the sounds with our movements,” Dowling explains. “People can see your movements and what’s effecting the sound, rather than clicking a button on a laptop. It brings an element of theatre to it.”

Although it may sound quite avant garde, Dowling insists that the music and how they play it on the night isn’t “highly obsure”, with traditional music and folk forming part of the set list.

“It’s meant to be a blurring of lines between electronic musicians and real instruments,” Dowling says.

See dublinlaptoporchestra.com or irishcomposerscollective.org. Tickets €10/€5 with concession, available from from nch.ie.