Digitonal was always centred around musical performance. I'm a player, not a programmer, and even as a kid studying the clarinet and piano I relied much more on expression within my playing than technical chops. In short, I was pretty lazy.
Digitonal started back in 1997 in my bedroom with a basic Yamaha W7 keyboard, trying to get what was in my head out. Eventually I met other musicians and the music became a conversation, and I think this was where the heart and soul of the music emerged. The balance of studio precision and on-stage instinct has been hard for me to find in the decades I've done this project, but in the end, it always comes back to the question of how can I express myself as a musician, regardless of process.
Over time, musicians rotated in and out of the line up and technology evolved and by the time I was writing Set the Weather Fair with Dom, I'd played in just about every combination of instrumentation and gear you can imagine. What has always been common, though, was to create space for the human. We've never once played a straight studio version. Tunes are cut up, stripped back, and the gear in service of creative choices in the moment on stage.
It might be tempo locked (and even that can be fluid sometimes), sampled and sequenced in places, but you've got to give yourself the space to take it where you want it to go, when you want it to go there.
You can't connect to an audience by pressing a sample launch at bar 33 because that's the way the tune goes. The performances where I've fallen back to this have been the most miserable of my life. As an introvert, I'm not a naturally dynamic performer, nor the most technical, and so the only thing in my arsenal that an audience can grab onto is my creative instinct.
This plays out super differently when you're playing with other people, but even when you're talking with the machines, you can find ways of creating space in the music to decide when to open a filter, or drop out a bassline, or slow everything down and jump on the piano for a spell.
These decisions, made in the moment, in tune with your bandmates and the audience, and the absolute definition of a 'performance' for me. Instinct, gut feel, emotional expression and the risk of it going horribly wrong is the only edge in which it's satisfying to play music live.
Now, in this era of literal push-a-button creation perhaps more than ever, electronic music needs to be a human process - the hand of the artist holding the reins of the machines. We can get lost in our desire for immaculate perfection across every waveshape, every envelope, every frequency band...but ultimately, what it will always come back to for me will be performance.
The Performance EP was recorded by Dom and I across various live events between 2020 and 2022. With the pandemic limiting our ability to perform the Set the Weather Fair album during its release, by the time we took to the stage again we'd reconfigured much of the material, stripping it back to core themes and allowing for this space again.
These recordings reflect this context shift out of studio isolation and back into public performance, where live musicianship and expression can take control of the music again.
Andrew Dobson
Suffolk, 2025