Sample-jockying
I collaborated a little bit with a guy who called himself a sample-jocky (I'm guessing he's not the only one who does that). Basically he had 2 MPCs and a ton of cool samples that he made. All the beats he used were his own, and he really knew his samples to the point where it really did become performance. He uses the two individual MPCs basically like turntables to beatmatch and works the fader on a standard 2 channel DJ board. He's got it down to a science, and is seriously workin it when he plays (maybe not quite on the level of a Q-Bert or such, but more so than 98% of the DJ's you see spinning records these days).
He's in New York now, if you ever hear of him he goes by "Ontic". He does some dope Hip-hop, trip-hop, jungle, drum and bass, and break beat varieties of stuff. I think he's got a the skills to make it big, so keep an eye/ear out for him if you dig that stuff.
What I think would be really cool (and have been considering creating for a while)- is a band that plays electronic music all-live. Real percussionists (mix of acoustic and digi), a couple of synths, a sample and/or turntablist, (but just to add, not to be the basis for grooves), and some vocals.
I think people would trip if a group could come out with tight electronica that actually came from live musicianship. One difficult thing about this is that a certain amount of monotonous repetition is really required by most electronic styles to give them a more authentic (electronic-authentic, instead of organic) feel, and it takes really good musicians to play the same phrase for x amount of bars (read hundreds), without varying it too much to create the right building electronica feel (esp on percussion).
Best wishes on your project.
