Everything. Everything at once. Once. (2)

Tag cloud datafile Back in October of last year I came up with a new idea on how to approach some of the music I’ve been making. The basic idea was to put the creative or ‘compositional’ focus on the instrumentation part of the process of music making (this being a very important aspect of music making, and improvisation specifically). As obvious as this seems, and as much as it’s actually part of my creative process, I had never focused on it explicitly.

The pieces in this series are called: “Everything. Everything at once. Once.” with each subsequent version increasing in number, and with letters added for each performance using that setup. In October I created versions 1a/1b/1c. Below are versions 2a/2b/2c/2d. All of them were filmed by Angela Guyton and close friend Linda Jankowska, who inspired the general musical approach.

Here is “Everything Everything at once. Once. (2a)”:

The way I’m approaching the pieces is that the videos themselves are the pieces. They aren’t instances of the piece. The ‘score’ for each piece is the point of departure to create the videos. I don’t intend on returning to any of the setups/approaches, not as part of this series anyways. As mentioned above this is mainly to highlight that part of my creative process which is, increasingly, less focused on the false dichotomy of ‘improvisation vs composition’. I’ve used this framework for many years but it’s not well suited to how I actually approach music making. There is no ‘before’ (as in compositional pre-planning) or a ‘now’ (as in the immediacy of improvisation). There is a single stream that runs through all of this. There are just decisions, happening at all points of the process.

Everything. Everything at once. Once. (2b)

For this second (2) piece in the series I wanted to focus on percussive sounds in the context of skipping CD style glitching. A toy piano and various metal percussion instruments are the main sounding bodies used in the piece. The glitching comes from software I’ve written. The Party Van is my all-in-one software that I use in nearly all my performances that involve a computer. A subset of that patch is The Chocolate Grinder which is built to emulate and behave like a skipping CD. I’ve used this kind of sound world in the past but wanted to be able to use it with real-time audio, so I built the Max patch to function and sound like a skipping CD.

The setup looks like this:

Everything. Everything at once. Once. (2c)

The visual look of these pieces is quite important, as the video IS the art object, not merely a documentation of it. Given my long-standing collaboration with Angela Guyton, she is responsible for all of the filming of these pieces. A new collaborator in this context is Linda Jankowska. During these performances Linda is operating the lighting, but she is also responsible for some of the framing, placement, and approach used in each video. Her lighting work in the videos is beautiful, particularly since she has such ‘performer’ sensitivity, she is able to follow my thinking while performing and complement the musical material visually. With Angie’s filming and Linda’s lighting I think the videos came out beautifully.

Everything. Everything at once. Once. (2d)

Here is the ‘score’ for version (2).

1 x Schoenhut 379B Toy Piano
1 x 6.5″ Cast iron pot lid
1 x 6.75″ Cast iron pot lid
1 x 7.5″ Cast iron pot lid
1 x 9″ Cast iron pot lid
2 x Singing bowls (with tin foil)
2 x Bell chimes
1 x Crotale
1 x Bell from bell tree
2 x Knitting needles
2 x Peter Erskine drum sticks
1 x Shortened Cello bow
1 x The Party Van 1.0beta
1 x monome 64
1 x monome arc2
1 x MacBook Pro
1 x MOTU Microbook II
1 x Mackie SRM350v2