User:Jamoo/Miss Picasso

Summary
Miss Picasso is a five-piece popular music band, founded in Sheffield (UK) in 2005, and comprising vocalist Leonore Wheatley, Frank Peters (guitar), James Mooney (synthesizers), Ben Elliott (bass) and Dave Moore (drums).

Stylistic and Musical Influences
The musical influences apparent in Miss Picasso's music are numerous, drawing on 'traditional' pop music styles (funk, jazz, blues, soul) and 'dance' music praxes (techno, drum & bass, breakbeat, house music) as well as 'classical' idioms (western, eastern, experimental). Culturally Miss Picasso's most obvious affiliation is with British electronica and trip-hop music. The combination of precise, complex rhythms and stylistically eclectic 'electronic' sounds with a powerful yet understated and highly melodic female vocal can also be observed (to a greater or lesser extent) in the music of Björk, Massive Attack, Portishead, Morcheeba, Moloko, Lamb, and Goldfrapp.

Unlike many trip-hop and electronica acts, however, Miss Picasso does not use sampling technology, sequencers, or backing tracks: all of the sounds are created live. This represents a practice in which the influence of technology on the creation of popular music has 'come full circle.' From the late 1960s onwards, electronic and (latterly) digital technologies - especially synthesis, sampling, MIDI and sequencing - fundamentally changed the sound of popular music. From the late 1980s onwards a growing body of popular music made use of these technologies in such a way that the results could not, at the time, be re-created 'manually' in live performance (e.g. 'house' music). Interestingly, and not by any means coincidentally, this trend was accompanied by something of a 'boom' in the DJ culture, whereby music in public venues (clubs for example) is performed from recordings rather than by live musicians. This freedom from (a) traditional musical instruments and (b) the limitations of human dexterity has led to musical developments that could otherwise never have existed (e.g. Autechre, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Future Sound of London, The Orb, Prodigy, not to mention a long-standing and continuously developing tradition of electroacoustic music). With Miss Picasso, we see these 'artificial' musical characteristics returning to the domain of genuine, human, live performance; hence 'full circle.' Needless to say, this requires a reasonably high level of technological expertise, not to mention musical virtuosity.

History
Miss Picasso arose as the result of a long-standing collaboration between producer/sound engineer Frank Peters, technologist, researcher and programmer Dave Moore, and composer, researcher and writer James Mooney. Following several years of informal musical activity, Peters, Moore and Mooney set up a recording studio and rehearsal space - The Room - in June 2005. The studio was intended to host a new band, as well as facilitating independent musical projects.

Shortly afterwards, bassist Ben Elliott - who had played alongside Moore in the Sheffield xxx band Crackpot Inventors - was recruited.