Live Spielen: Liveness in Performances elektronischer Tanzmusik
University of York (UK)
As I write this review I am looking at an old ticket stub on my desk for an event in July 2025 in Leeds. The stub includes all the usual information you’d expect from the gig ticket: venue, time, price, promoter, etc. The headline of the stub displays the name of the artist, followed by the following text in bold: “Live DJ Set”. To some, this may be paradoxical; how can a DJ set where an artist is playing pre-produced records one after the other be “live”? Some may even see such a claim as audacious if the artist is not playing their own work using acoustic, amplified and/or electronic musical instruments and employing a level of mastery or even virtuosity. Some may take a more sympathetic view. Surely the presence of the artist and audience and some sort of interaction between the two is enough to make the performance “live”. Debates around what a live performance involves are pervasive in electronic dance music cultures. Views are manifold, and long have ravers, artists and enthusiasts debated the nuances of liveness in electronic dance music performance. If this is a debate you have had or are preparing for your next heated discussion on the topic, perhaps you might want to come equipped with some robust arguments. And if robust arguments on liveness are what you are looking for, look no further than Josef Schaubruch’s Live Spielen.
Live Spielen is a comprehensive and critical review on notions of liveness in electronic dance music performances. Rather than attempting to provide an absolute definition of the term, Schaubruch highlights the theoretical and practical complexities and vagueness bound up with it. The work is convincing and presents a solid theoretical background around liveness in dance music genres, before undertaking empirical study and analysis on electronic artists who perform live and have a variety of different perspectives on what that means to them. Schaubruch considers a number of positions on the notion of liveness, spanning from more common (mostly electronic) instrumental performances to the understanding of the DJ set as a “live” practice (or not, as some argue), and the importance of corporeality, embodiment and an audience’s presence and interaction with the artist to a live performance.
The first chapter is centred around the ambiguity of live performance in electronic music. It elegantly outlines the anxieties of electronic dance music artists around whether something might be live, as well as introducing the various constellations of live performance in electronic music, including turntablism, live coding, hardware performances and more. In this theoretical introduction, Schaubruch also emphasises that his reflections on liveness often stem from less tangible phenomena like practice and affect as well as technologies, placing artists and audiences as critical to his discussion. Chapter 2 presents a solid and comprehensive literature review. This chapter is particularly strong and is a useful resource for those working in or interested in the blooming academic discussion around liveness and electronic dance music. Notable in the chapter is linguistic analysis of genre and musical role (e.g. DJ/producer) across English and German, and the assertion that providing a single binary definition of “liveness” (i.e. “live” and “not live”) is no longer possible. In doing so, Schaubruch mostly avoids falling into traps around defining what may or may not be authentic, again focussing on the multiplicity and vagueness of the terms he explores. Following the rigorous review of literature, he provides a brief outline of his methodology which is clear and addresses gaps in field, particularly in the empirical study of liveness in electronic dance music. His discussion around reflexive Grounded Theory is both engaging and goes some way in addressing the perpetual complexity of aligning the specificities of Dance Music Cultures with research methodologies. At the same time, there is a clear engagement with the author’s positionality as researcher, artist and participant in the dance music culture.
The fourth chapter plots Schaubruch’s findings and his own theoretical reflections on them, extracting broader themes stemming from the empirical work with artists who professionally engage with live electronic music performance. The outcomes are expansive, supported by informative diagrams. One particularly striking observation, albeit one that might be predictable to the reader, is the cultural capital that liveness holds for the artists interviewed. There is an inherent tension among artists’ reflections on what “liveness” is, with some focussed on the practice of using live instruments itself, while others with more of a focus towards creating moments of presence with audiences. Not one to shy away from the complexity of these arguments, Schaubruch explores where these tensions intersect, extending notions of subject and object to body (artist) and equipment, as well as artist and audience, exploring the relationships between musicians and instruments as an illustrative comparison.
Overall, Live Spielen presents a thorough, rigorous and engaging analysis on the role that liveness has in the performance of electronic dance music. He leans into the diversity and conflicts in both the literature and the points of view of the artists he interviews to illustrate the richness and potential in various definitions of live performances of electronic dance music. There are a (very small) handful of instances where it might be inferred that value judgements around live performances being “better” than DJ sets, particularly in the “Grad an Liveness”, are being made. Although these appear to emerge from the author’s empirical work, their absolute presentation may be seen to negate the vagueness in terminology that Schaubruch so effectively builds throughout most of the text. While not necessarily within the scope of this work, an exploration on the role of liveness in studio production, and how live performances translate to the composition and production of fixed media is missing in the book and perhaps presents a gap for future work.
Admittedly, when I first received the ticket for the above-mentioned event in Leeds, I scoffed at the absurdity of a “Live DJ Set”. I was convinced that the headline description of the event was wholly paradoxical, perhaps a marketing ploy that plays into Schaubruch’s assertions on the cultural capital of the live set. Having read Live Spielen and considered the vagueness of the notion liveness in electronic dance music however, I am not so sure, and this is one of the great successes of this text; it questions as much as it answers.