Meet Crewdson, a British sound artist and producer whose shows involve live recording and experimentation, all using Ableton Live and a selection of performance controllers. Central to his setup is a Novation Launchpad, with which he controls Ableton Live and Max/MSP.

He recently performed at the Ether festival at London's Southbank Centre, an annual music festival of innovation, art, technology and cross-arts experimentation. "My set consists of recording sounds live and then triggering and manipulating them as samples in real time. The Launchpad serves as my control surface for recording and then becomes the responsive sample pads which I perform on. The only two pieces of software that I use are Ableton Live and Max/Msp, so the Launchpad offers me a straightforward way of controlling Ableton without having to fiddle around with my laptop, whilst also being entirely programable to integrate with the Max patches that I have built to enable my live sampling. I love experimenting with samples in the studio but wanted to take this process to the stage and make it part of the performance. Its hard to try and find any object that you cant get some kind of interesting sound out of and its the layering and manipulating of these recorded sounds together with my sax, vocals and beats that forms the backbone of my music"

Crewdson's debut album will be released later this year on Slowfoot Records (www.slowfoot.co.uk). You can listen to his music here: www.myspace.com/crewdsonsounds