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By Dave Burdick and Karen Zraick
Barefoot and backlit by floor-to-ceiling windows, Langdon Crawford's upper lip was curled into a rock-star snarl as he shredded power chords, sending searing, staticky riffs blaring out of the amplifier. But there was no guitar. In his hands, Crawford gripped two curved plastic pipe sections about the size of soda cans, jam-packed with circuitry and covered in pressure-sensitive buttons.
Crawford, 28, created the AirGuitars in his cramped, thin-walled East Village apartment, where there was no space to fit a whole rock band. He can throw all the gadgets needed for an Air Band show into his messenger bag.
The devices are part of his quest to revolutionize electronic music performance. Inexpensive software like the popular and user-friendly GarageBand program has made for a shift in the way music is created and distributed. But the sweaty spectacle of a rock concert can't be replaced by some guy pressing buttons on his laptop keyboard, Crawford said. If you see someone rocking out, you want to rock out, too. It's that feedback that causes a big hall with musicians at one end of it to turn into a performance space -- a rock 'n' roll space.
The Air Band's other two members, lead air guitarist Willie Fastenow, 26, and drummer Laura Sinnott, 28, held matching sets of the space-age instruments. While Crawford and Fastenow moved their hands in ways that mostly mimicked air-guitar moves and elicited chords and sci-fi-sounding swooshes, Sinnott's more graceful gestures brought forth thumping drum samples, and commanded them to get louder, faster, weirder. The band's rehearsal in Sinnott's SoHo apartment lasted a couple of hours and took them through the songs they would play a week later at The Tank, a Tribeca perfomance space.
The Air Guitars are tiny and connect to laptops with headphone outputs. Crawford bills them as a space-saving solution for New York rockers in undersized apartments.
The Air Band can also practice at all hours in an apartment, without having to rent rehearsal space. They don’t have to make a ton of noise and upset the neighbors when they practice because they can plug into headphones.
But with all that focus on convenience and portability, Crawford was afraid the performative aspects of live music would be lost. (Continued)
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