Inside Circle of Live: Watch Clark, Rival Consoles & Sebastian Mullaert Perform an Improvised Set

Added: 2026-05-01

[00:00:02]Sebastian and myself started Circle of Life in 2018. Every time the artists are different, we allow the artist the full freedom to do anything they want. The only thing is first listen and then express and that's the only rule that comes with our channels.

[00:00:21]It just seems like a really good idea to put a bunch of people together and let them improvise and listen to each other and add their own little thumb print and see what happens. I like the spirit of it a lot.

[00:00:37]This is something I've never done ever.

[00:00:40]It's just a chance to kind of like almost ask questions to yourself and hear an answer in front of an audience which is quite a sort of special thing.

[00:00:53]My intention with Circle of Live is to combine different artists I haven't met in a way that welcomes spontaneuity and improvisation.

[00:01:03]Seeing yourself, allowing yourself in the context of others as well and new situations that you're not used to.

[00:01:14]We've kind of deliberately kept it a bit oblique so that we can surprise each other. Makes it more fun. Makes it slightly more terrifying, but only like 1% more terrifying. I always feel pressure on stage anyway just because I think I have this classic attitude of needing to present myself in a way that is understood almost. There's kind of an internal version of that amongst all three of us. and then the kind of the effect of people witnessing it. So it it might be the case that it's almost so much going on that you actually just forget. For me is one of the essence of circle of live. It's to like oh I'm nervous here.

[00:01:58]What are we going to do? I don't know.

[00:02:00]It's like maybe I should plan something.

[00:02:02]No, you don't need to. This project is actually about the opposite. To show that it's okay to not have a plan. It's okay to just jump and see what happens.

[00:02:12]And it's okay that it's not perfect.

[00:02:32]Actually, all of my things that I would call compositions, they all come from improvisation really.

[00:02:58]There'll just be one take of a melody that will be the whole track from day one, but then you know you've got the rough outline, but there are just hundreds of gradations of what that could be.

[00:03:17]I got obsessed with microonal music last year and listened to as much as I could in the space of about 2 months. It's a fascinating area.

[00:03:27]If you play in like an 18 note scale, there's a whole system you need to learn.

[00:03:34]My wife just refers to it as that out of tune stuff. It's like, no, it's not.

[00:03:39]When you go back to 12 EDO, even quite complicated classical music sounds too transparent and conservative.

[00:03:49]But when you then get out of that microonal world and then go back into it, it can just sound like a complete mess.

[00:03:58]I was thinking of bringing some alternate tunings to the show, but it might throw people off a bit. So, we'll see.

[00:04:21]I don't like things to be too locked into something.

[00:04:25]I quite like things to constantly be moving really like background, foreground.

[00:04:32]I think it gives space for ideas to come and and meet together, you know, versus here's a very complete thing that's always consistent.

[00:04:42]I've definitely been inspired by Clark for many years. He was one of the first artists that showed me a very specific style of electronic music which was very like organic and almost symphonic but with synthesizers in a way that I'd never heard before.

[00:04:59]I think all three of us are quite thoughtful people when it comes to making.

[00:05:05]The danger is that actually know too much going into this because we've been making music for a long time in an obsessive way.

[00:05:13]It would be interesting >> when I play solo. It's more take a breath and then connect with myself somehow through playing. So it becomes very meditative before I open up and connect with the crowd. To play with other people is almost the opposite angle. It's really about listen and connect. Especially in a situation like this when it's with someone you never played with.

[00:05:51]Both Ryan and Chris are exploring things, especially Chris has explored a lot of aspects of electronic music, but darker sides and the more bright and beautiful sides.

[00:06:04]And I think for a jam like our jam tomorrow, it's a lot of fun when you don't know what angle it could take and it could possibly go anywhere.

[00:06:28]>> Barely started.

[00:06:30]>> No, I I've got it. I I'm strongly in the 160 bit.

[00:06:33]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:06:35]Electronic artists tend to be quite cliche, introverted, >> solitary people, almost like writers >> because we are often that it doesn't mean that we're not very improvisational or of the moment and spontaneous.

[00:06:53]>> I feel there's a lot of things within me and maybe Chris and any other people that have never done it before that just naturally will be attracted to this kind of a situation.

[00:07:04]So I I don't mind to be here.

[00:07:06]>> I I have tried to find time. Okay.

[00:07:08]>> Okay.

[00:07:08]>> I'm sending the profit to the to Ableton from >> Yes.

[00:07:16]>> Open the bag. Yes.

[00:07:27]>> I've just got a profit 6 the same desk that I use in my studio. the Midas 16 channel and a drum machine, the analog rhythm, which I've used for my live shows for like years, and then Ableton and like a batch of sort of MIDI that I can transform in the moment. But because there's two other people who will be adding layers, I quite like the idea of just playing synths live. To be honest, >> I will be playing the Oxy1 sequencer.

[00:08:02]There's nothing pre-written. I will be writing everything in the moment. That's going to then go to the Rev 2 Profit 8 synthesizer.

[00:08:11]I'll also be playing keys into that, which will be the Arturia Keystep.

[00:08:16]>> I'll also be sending melodic information to the Straga, the Alessandro Cortini synthesizer with Make Noise. And obviously everything's going to be coming from Ableton is going to be the kind of main clock to everything. And I also use a lot of stock Ableton effects.

[00:08:32]I wanted to give myself a framework where I can go from the very big and aggressive to, you know, very background supportive ingredients and always blurring between these two worlds.

[00:08:46]>> For this show, I just brought a little boutique 101 and a boutique Juno 60.

[00:08:53]I have two controllers that are customuilt a little small chord keyboard and when I play a soft synth or an outboard syn on MIDI and I want to layer and loop it, I just hit record on the push and there is a little phrase because you have the fixed length and I can choose to have a bar or eight bars or whatever.

[00:09:17]Looking at the technical aspect, we have how to sync everything and how to mix.

[00:09:25]We sync with Ableton Link. That's how I did it since we started with Circle of Live. We have quite a short concert, but we all love to work in different tempos.

[00:09:36]So, in this specific concert, we have this tempo slots. There is 20 30 minutes in each slot to go around.

[00:09:53]And with the mixing each person have a stereo output from their own setup. So everyone take care of their own mix and I have a summing mixer next to me.

[00:10:06]So I have each person and then I have an outboard looper so I can always loop the other artists.

[00:10:28]have to make sure that we we're not playing with a really low pace. So, Heat.

[00:10:49]Heat.

[00:10:59]Heat.

[00:11:16]Heat.

[00:11:42]Heat. Heat.

[00:11:52]Heat.

[00:12:10]Heat.

[00:12:29]I'm a complete control freak. So, this actually feels like a holiday because I get to not be a control freak for an evening and just kind of let things go and let people make of it what they want to make of it.

[00:12:53]If you want to talk about intention and freeing yourself from any prescriptive ideas you might have, then try writing a track like as soon as you wake up.

[00:13:04]It's amazing how you hear music differently when you're still sort of half asleep.

[00:13:10]Like that's the scary thing. Some of the music I write, which I'm happy with, I just forget about because I don't remember writing it because I sort of feel like I wasn't there.

[00:13:40]Come here.

[00:14:00]Heat. Heat.

[00:14:20]Heat. Heat.

[00:14:30]Heat. Heat.

[00:14:47]Heat. Heat.

[00:15:12]Heat.

[00:15:16]Heat.

[00:15:37]We live in a time where there's such a deep understanding of performing electronic music in terms of it being very controlled, but you don't really experience a more chaotic version very often.

[00:15:51]people probably want to hear an organic development of things, you know, cuz we every day people are confronted with like hundreds of thousands of here's a thing that's completely done. Um, so it's probably just like quite a healthy thing for everyone.

[00:16:30]A good live show for me is if I end up rendering a track I've made in a hotel room 45 minutes before I go on stage and I haven't really finished it properly, but I've kind of chopped it up enough to perform it live and improvise with it.

[00:16:46]Those are the bits that I always look forward to in the live show the most. Just that sort of slightly chaotic energy where like you've heard it loud. It's the first time the audience have heard it and it probably won't happen again in exactly the same way.

[00:17:17]And this feels like that energy times 10 with two other people to kind of help you out on stage. So that makes it really exciting.

[00:17:59]Creativity is not something that certain people have or have more. It's something that we allow or we hold it back.

[00:18:14]It always starts with a step and when we do that together it's a sharing it's a connection things take form.

[00:18:25]Circle of life is not very complicated.

[00:18:27]We intentionally brought in artists from very different moments of their career.

[00:18:33]People who have played for a very long time and people that never played live before. It's not a competition. It's not a race. It's just allowing that to happen.

[00:18:47]A jam like this will never be a perfect composition. And there are moments of searching or weirdness. There are moments that are too long. It's a little bit like every person's life.

[00:19:05]That is my wish with circle of life to show people as well that that we dare to do this on stage you know we don't need to strive for that perfectness try things it's about taking that step and that first step leads to the next step and it's not something that we can do once and get it ah this is creativity okay now I know it it's a never ending story and you can't think about You can just continue to allow it.

[00:19:57]Heat.

[00:20:12]Heat.

[00:20:20]Heat. Heat.

[00:20:52]OKAY.