Photos By: Alex Harris

Article By: Andrew Brown

The Live Experience is a four-piece act that formed two years ago when two groups of Atlanta music veterans hooked up.  They combine computer produced electronic beats with live drumming and guitar playing.  The Live Experience played their fifth gig on October 28th, opening for Rusko at Masquerade.  Before their set, we spoke about their upcoming EP, renaming the band, and how best to describe the group’s sound.  The Live Experience is Michael “MJ” Jackson (percussion), Charlie “Charlie P” Pazinets (computer), Michaelangelo (guitar, vocals, percussion), and Daniel McBeezy (drums).

Andy Brown:  How did the Live Experience form?

Michael Jackson:  It was really Charlie who started it.  Charlie and Daniel have been playing together for years, and me and Michaelangelo have been playing together for years.  Charlie asked me to come play drums with him at a show, what, a year and a half ago?

AB:  Your Facebook says that tonight’s the first time the four of you are playing together?

MJ:  Live, yeah.  This is the first full Live Experience.  We’re actually changing the name to Living Experience.

AB:  Why is that?

MJ:  Well it started out as the Charlie P Live Experience, but as it became more a band we wanted to make it more communal.

Daniel McBeezy:  And imagine googling Live Experience, like a million things are going to come up.

AB:  That’s what I did.  You get a MySpace page for some British promotion company.

DM:  So Living Experience is just a way to narrow it down.

MJ:  Right, right, exactly.  And the whole band is going to start recording EPs and albums and stuff like that so Live Experience doesn’t translate to studio albums.  The Living Experience encompasses so much and means so much to different people.

AB:  How do you guys perform?

MJ:  So far it’s been improvisational.  It is a living experience you know, improvisation is a living organism, it grows, it changes, you go back and it’s different.

AB:  So you jam mostly when you play?

DM:  It’s like [Charlie P] has a bunch of skeleton songs in his computer, so we kind of jam along to him.  Certain things get more concrete the more we play them, but we’re still very fluid right now, especially with the four of us playing live for the first time.

AB:  So on the production side, do you handle all of that?

Charlie P:  At the moment…We have a really versatile set, it goes from dubstep to house…I don’t think we’re gonna do any breaks tonight, but we’ll go from 140 to 180.

DM:  We can do virtually anything.

MJ:  The only thing constant with The Living Experience as far as genre is its gotta be bass influenced and its gotta be uplifting.  And that’s really our only two components.  We try to span as many genres of electronic as possible.

CP:  It’s not uplifting so much as mind-opening, or taking you mind some place else.  Like it might be uplifting one minute and then the next minute you’re rethinking your entire existence.

MJ:  Which is uplifting, right?  [Laughs]

AB:  So is tribal hop [from The Live Experience Facebook page] your catchall term?

MJ:  No, no, that wasn’t us.  We don’t really like that.

AB:  You don’t brand yourselves with any one genre?

MJ:  No not really.

CP:  Bass music.

MJ:  Very tribal bass music with spiritual overtones, that’s what I would say.

AB:  You guys are dropping an EP soon?

MJ:  Yeah, we’re gonna start recording that in what, two weeks?

AB:  Have you started writing it?

DM: No its mainly been Charlie right now, but we all have ideas.

Michaelangelo:  We have such experience with music that we’re able to get the groove together in no time – pull all the things that make sense and put them together.

DM:  It’s really a lot of collage – Charlie and I come up with one idea and by the time it’s finished it’s something completely different.

CP:  Yeah, and that’s the whole point – we all do something different, so its not like I wrote a track, there’s still three different parts.

MJ:  Michaelangelo writes music as well, so that’ll be incorporated.  He has a lot of musical ideas, I have a lot of musical ideas, Daniel…Once we get something recorded it’ll definitely be all of our DNA.

AB:  Are you guys going to start playing more gigs?

MJ:  Our goal is to never play in front of less than 1000 people.  You can play 30 shows with 30 people and get the same exposure in one show.

AB:  So are we going to see a full blown tour any time soon?

MJ:  Probably by the summer of next year I think we’ll have our name out enough to be able to do that.