Everything. Everything at once. Once.
Following on from the compositional ideas I had been developing in my .com pieces (form as content) and Battle pieces (challenge as content), I’m working on a new set of pieces where the choice of instruments is the composition.
Instrumentation as content.
This is how I approach most of my improv stuff, particularly coming from a multi-instrumentalist/DIY place. The choice of the instruments/devices is very much part of the creative process. I hadn’t formally considered this as part of my process before, but it was definitely there. It zooms out on the scope of my compositional thinking from being about interaction/form/memory to happening before any formal elements take place at all.
Before I say more, here is composition 1a from the series:
The seedling for this way of thinking was some recent collaborative experiments with honest and able violinist Linda Jankowska. She had me dust off my stringed-drum bits and was playing with that for a while. It got me thinking about how much an instrument/setup, particularly an esoteric one, lends itself to a certain kind of playing. What you do in context is, to an extent, articulating what you had in mind when you put those instruments together.
Shortly after Angela Guyton filmed her videos, I decided that I would make some videos of my own. I decided on the following setup:
1 x 12″ Pork Pie snare drum
1 x 13″ Pearl snare drum
1 x 12″ Rancan chinese cymbal
1 x 6.5″ toy cymbal
1 x 6.5″ Cast iron pot lid
1 x 4″ Coin dish
1 x Beaker t-shirt
1 x ciat-lonbarde Fourses (Electric Whisks)
1 x Fender Deluxe amplifier
1 x Ernie Ball volume pedal
At this point I hadn’t yet decided on using this as a compositional approach. It was just part of my creative process.
The title of the series of pieces is “Everything. Everything at once. Once.”.
I think it really suits this way of thinking about composition. I don’t know where this compositional approach begins and my normal creative process ends, but I don’t think I will compose a gigantic amount of these pieces. For now, it is something I am exploring.
.com pieces
The .com pieces are a series of pieces I started in early 2013 which are centered around snare drum feedback and form/memory as composi(/improvisa)tional material. So far I have finished two of them, iminlovewithanothergirl.com (for snare, microphone and DMX lights) and ialreadyforgotyourpussy.com (for amplified wind instrument and amplified snare). The third and final .com piece is in the sketching stages and is as of yet untitled.
photo by Nick Rutter
Shbobo/Shnth/Ciat-Lonbarde
So back in March I got some funding from my school to bring one of my favorite instrument makers to the UK.
Peter Blasser has been making crazy amazing instruments for years now, and I’ve been using them from the point they were first available as kits (the original Fourses/Fyrall).
Peter has started a new company focusing on digital/embedded instruments, the first of which is the Shnth. I can attest to it’s kickass-ness.
Check out all the links to learn more about it, but this post is mainly about two videos. The first is an excerpt from a performance Peter and I did. The second is an amazing documentary (by Angela Guyton) about the workshop itself.
Flute + Snare
So I’ve been planning a piece for Richard Craig and myself after discovering that he, too, has been working on feedback-based instrument playing. The idea is to follow up my snare/feedback piece, iminlovewithanothergirl.com (score), with a piece for flute/feedback + snare/feedback. This will be the second of a planned trilogy of .com pieces. I’ve been developing a dynamic score display system which I will debut with this piece, but more on that later.
Here are some videos:
strikethrough me & you – Battle Pieces
“Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.” — Ice-T
The Battle Pieces are a series of pieces composed, and performed, with Sam Andreae (as strikethrough me & you) which focus on complex games, improvisational etudes, and competition. The idea for the Battle Pieces came about during a rehearsal of a free-improv duo we had been developing where we decided we wanted to expand on what we were doing together, while still retaining improvisational freedom. This eventually took the form of the Battle Pieces. Essentially each Battle Piece is a game, but beyond being an improv game, it is also competitive, and generally deals with an aspect of improvisation that we want to explore further and/or improve on.
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Battle Pieces
So before I get into the Battle Pieces, it’d be foolish not to start with a yo momma joke.
Yo momma is soooo bad at improv endings that…
strikethrough me & you is a duo with Sam on tenor sax and me on drums. We had each been working on setups that involved solo improv on electronically augmented instruments but wanted to explore something using only stripped-down acoustic instruments. We initially began with just free improv, but during the compositional process of iminlovewithanothergirl.com Sam and I began testing out some of the formal materials (A/B/C pages) from that piece in a duo context. Some of the motivation to do this was to move away from the established canon of tenor sax and drums in free jazz. Those instruments just screamed “FREE JAZZ!” And as we all know, jazz is stupid. This exploration led us to expand and exaggerate the challenge/etude nature of iminlovewithanothergirl.com until the point that it became a competition – a battle.
This led to the idea of a “Battle Piece”: a musical game/challenge where winning and losing had material consequences in the piece. Much like in iminlovewithanothergirl.com, the actual content is not prescribed in any way. In these, the interaction is the composed material of the pieces. It is the idea of interaction as content.
The implementation of game theory in music has a history. Xenakis‘ implementation of game theory in pieces like Duel, although groundbreaking, lacks legibility in terms of the audience perceiving the actual interplay composed into the piece. The mechanics of the piece are primarily focused on balancing the zero-sum characteristics of matrices rather than aesthetics or non-mathematical interplay (Xenakis 1971). That isn’t to say that legibility (of the rules) is terribly important in Battle Pieces, but even the more complex methods of interaction produce legible artifacts, primarily in the form of visible emotion. Much like how it is not necessary to understand the rules of an unfamiliar sport in order to enjoy the game in some manner, the mere fact that there is visible interaction produces a kind of legibility which can be appreciated on its own merit. As Sam put it, “If we work hard enough on the interactions themselves so that we’re clear in them–clear on what our roles are–then it should generate quite strong musical results regardless of whether we tell people how we’re doing it” (Andreae 2013).
An example of possible tactics in Duel (Xenakis 1971, 115)
The general approach used in Battle Pieces has more in common with Zorn‘s game pieces than they do with Xenakis’. Zorn says of his motivation to create game pieces, which formed most of his compositional output from the late 70s to the early 80s, culminating in Cobra, that he “wanted to find something to harness the personal languages that the improvisers had developed on their own” (Duckworth 1999). So the solution for him was “to deal with form, not with content, with relationships, not with sound” (Duckworth 1999). This idea of relationships, or interaction, is a central concern in the Battle Pieces.
Guerrilla system Tactics in Cobra by John Zorn
Although I was not directly inspired by the work of Christian Wolff, there is some similarity to the tension and confusion he worked with in his ensemble pieces of the 50s and 60s. Wolff’s use of relational notation, instructing performers to begin before/after a sound they have heard, or play a sound lower/higher in pitch to an existing note, gives the music a sense of immediacy and tension that would not be possible to arrive at another way. Even the pacing of the music is affected by these types of ‘games’, or more simply put by Philip Thomas (a long-time performer of Wolff’s music), “confusion is [used as] a rhythmic device in Wolff’s music” (Thomas 2014).
All Battle Pieces are composed collaboratively during rehearsals, with both of us contributing to the concepts, gameplay, rules, and mechanics of each piece. Although some close friends have tried the pieces out, they are meant to be performed only by Sam and me. The identity of each piece is made up of not only the rules/game/instructions and the type of material we improvise around, which can evolve over time, it is also made up of our personalities. As musicians, performers, and human beings, our personalities and general sense of play make up a big part of the Battle Pieces’ identities.
The core ideas for many Battle Pieces emerge from discussions following free improvisations during strikethrough me & you rehearsals. We sometimes end up finding something about the improvisation that could have been better and link that to tendencies or behaviors that we have as improvisers/performers. This leads to the creation of a piece, or pieces, that tackles that specific aspect of improvisation (endings, space, synchronicity, memory, density, etc.). Through learning, rehearsing, and performing those pieces we improve on the improvisation skills that we had originally found lacking. This process often leads to pieces becoming obsolete as they are no longer challenging or have become part of our general improvisational language and skill set, making the conception/composition/performance/obsolescence of Battle Pieces a microcosm of the feedback loop and intertwinement of my general practice.
The scores that we play from are the instructions for the pieces scribbled onto A4 sheets of paper, as can be seen in the sketches included with each commentary. Since we write the pieces for ourselves there is no need to create thorough notations for each piece, but rather, we jot down a compact set of instructions that we can quickly read to remind ourselves of the rules of the game. A long-term goal, once we have 78 compositions, is to have the instructions for each piece printed on Tarot cards, so that we can shuffle them and pull out cards (pieces) at random during a performance.
In the next section I will present the instructions, sketches, videos and recordings, along with explanations of the instructions, compositional thinking, and performative insight, of the following Battle Pieces:
- yo momma – the creation and baiting/trapping of improvisational endings
- glitch beat – variation/exhaustion, internal/external learning, and repetition
- flurries – spectromorphological acoustic sound masses with fixed compositional elements
- switches – unison playing with encoded/decoded musical information
- eat, eat everything – memory, special events, and in/out/frozen time performance
- sausage fest – space, silence, trajectories, and collective gesture playing
- strains – rock, paper, scissors meets polyrhythmic memory games intertwined with improv
- elbows – the creation of rapid shifts in musical material
- AB(B)A – discovering and transplanting a spontaneous musical games
- pop song – repetition, memory, and form in a freely improvised context
Snare + Microphone
Before I talk, here is some sights and sounds:
During my summer tour last year I improv-ed my way into using a condenser mic as a friction implement. The sounds were harsh, but very controllable and with a great continuity between vastly different types of sounds/playing. I instantly knew I was on to something, and wanted to explore this further.
Fast forward to one month ago.
I was starting to plan/conceive my next composition, having recently started a PhD at the University of Huddersfield, and wanted to explore this microphone/snare thing further. At the same time, I had decided that I was going to move away from the “middle man” of writing a composition, for myself, to perform. (More on this, and the implications of it in a future post). I decided to use this very limited mode of playing as the backbone of this exploration. No other implements, no electronics (other than amplification/distortion), no “easy” solutions to the problem I was trying to solve.
This video is not that solution. It is just a document of some of the sounds and playing techniques I’ve been exploring.
Solo drums + electronics
So I went on a UK tour recently doing solo drums + electronics.
Here is a ‘showreel’ of sorts, documenting some choice bits from the different performances.
This was the first tour I’ve done since moving onto a laptop as my performance setup. The center piece of that is The Party Van, my all-in-one laptop performance solution. It was nice doing a bunch of (relatively) back to back gigs to really get ‘inside’ the mechanics of my patch/setup.
The footage was shot and edited by my wife, Angela Guyton, who shoots most(all) of my videos nowadays. There’s a longer (10minutes) sort of documentary on me in the works covering my live stuff, instrument building, bands, composition etc… Very much looking forward to that.
Weak Without You (new composition)
Weak Without You is my latest composition commissioned by Distractfold Ensemble.
It looks and sounds like this:
It’s written for three female performers who sing and clap (with a bit of a pitched instrument at end). The performers (Linda Jankowska, Emma Richards, and Alice Purton) did a great job with the piece, particularly considering the nakedness of just singing/clapping.
This is the first piece I’ve composed since starting my PhD at the University of Huddersfield and it’s probably one of my simplest/cleanest pieces. The materials are super stark, and I think it really works.
‘Underneath the hood’ there are some further explorations into some of my ideas about ‘fake’ time. Sections B/C/D in the score make use of these ideas, and during the rehearsals the term “real time” and “fake time” were thrown around a lot (to the initial confusion of the performers).
Here is the full score:
Oh yeah, and it’s a ‘cover’ of Survivor by Destiny’s Child….
Musicianship Drills
Here are a couple videos I made for the Art of Teaching project of my favorite drills for working your time and ears.
C-C-Combine
C-C-Combine is a corpus-based audio mosiacing application, built in Max/MSP, based on concatenative synthesis.
It sounds like this:
And looks like this:
A Greater Horror – Debut EP release
So here it finally is. The post-jazz trio that I’ve been working on with Mauricio Pauly and Alex Tod (A Greater Horror) has finished our debut EP. As always the artwork is by Angela Guyton though this time we’ve gone with a commercially duplicated full-color sleeve type thing.
I’ve very happy with the integration of my software The Party Van into the recording, as all of these tracks were getting gigged before I had even started programming again. You can see/hear more of it in action with the live video we made a bit ago by clicking here.
You can listen to, or buy a download of physical copy of the EP on the bandcamp page here:
Trio with PA Tremblay & Sam Andreae
Had a gig the other night with two of my favorite performers (Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (we just finished recording a followup album) and Sam Andreae.
You can see The Party Van in action on my side, with some more Max/MSP goodness coming from PA. Sam? He kicks it oldschool with some ciat-lonbarde digs, some general DIY grunginess, and with a new school twist, an Arduino.
Teachers/Teaching
I am what I am today because a series of teachers who inspired, challenged, and believed in me. Today I received the Positive Impact Award in the Student Led Teaching Awards at the Royal Northern College of Music, where I teach Musicianship.
It is a massive honor to be nominated for, and receive this award. I have been very fortunate to encounter some amazing teachers in my life and I hope I can do for my students but a fraction of what they have done for me.
Many thanks to Thomas Trenkler, Joseph Bragg, Jo Foster, David Weissbrot, Jane Pyle, and all teachers who inspire students everywhere.
In the studio
Spent the last three days in the studio with Pierre Alexandre Tremblay for our second album together. Some crazy amazing stuff. I’m very much looking forward to this one coming out. If all goes well it should be later this year.
As you can see in the photo The Party Van is in effect, along with Old Mr.Grassi, the Specty, and my monome/arc.
New Instrument – The Specty
Finally finished the Specty, the more compact and portable version of my Specto instrument. It looks and sounds like this:
For more info including build pictures and all of that click here.