…a celebration of the practice of improvisation in all its diversity, complexity and, perhaps, contradictions
The flooding in Cork city has affected the Lewis Glucksman Gallery. The Gallery has offered generous behind-the-scenes support to Stet Lab, and they’ve hosted improvised music performances by guests of the Lab (including Paul Dunmall, Don Malone, Mark Sanders, John Godfrey, Mick O’Shea, Franziska Schroeder, Bruce Coates and Jamie Smith), numerous Stet Lab (ir)regulars and occasional drop-ins (including Han-earl Park, Neil O’Loghlen, Niwel Tsumbu and Christian Martin).
I’m sitting in London writing this.
[I’m typing this up in Cork several days later, however….]
My initial idea for this report, fueled by my less-than-wonderful playing with Paul Dunmall (Paul, of course, is never less than fantastic) [info on this performance…], was to write about the tightrope balancing act between playing something—crafting something—‘musically’ satisfactory (however you gauge [...]
Stet Lab (ir)regulars Marian Murray and Tony O’Connor will be performing at the launch concert of the CD, Rediscovering Locality: A Sonology of Cork Sound Art+. As part of ArtTrail, the event takes place at 8:00 pm on Sunday, November 15th 2009, at the Savoy Mezzanine, Cork, Ireland.
Since Piaras Hoban published an algorithmically generated text for his Lab report, and since I’m not averse to conversations with technics, I thought I’d follow his example with a conversation with Eliza (in this case Charles Hayden’s Java implementation of Eliza), the grandmother of Turing-test contenders. Here’s a more-or-less unedited conversation on the October Stet [...]
I’ve said previously that “I’d be lying if I said I did not have allegiances—in idiom, in tradition, and in practice—I do, but I want to stress the possibility of trans-cultural meetings and creative (mis)understandings.”
I don’t subscribe to a silly ideology of some impossibly impartial, neutral, transcendental performance, free of tradition, history, identity. I’m not [...]
Somewhere in Belfast, May 16, 2009
Snippets from a conversation between three musicians:
“Man, I should play more free jazz.”
“It’s not an idiom at all…”
“…a tradition? …a practice?”
“Just play all over the keyboard.”
“It is so much fun.”
“Why don’t I do this all the time?”
“There’s nothing better.”
“There really isn’t.”
“And it’s the simplest algorithm: play all the time, and [...]
What is the status of ‘failure’ in improvisative performance? Is the notion of failure relevant to improvised music? If relevant, is it important in the ongoing practice (evolution, mutation or adaptation) of improvisation?
safety…
For me ‘oxleygrass (Marie’s phone)’ really doesn’t work as music. I think, at best, it’s a technical demonstration.
The ditty didn’t go anywhere: no [...]
Stet Lab, Cork, February 10, 2009
Before we go on stage, I joke with Jamie Smith that we’re the two guitarists who’re going to be tripping up each other (and that the drummer, Owen Sutton, will have to pick through the carnage).
By ‘tripping up’ I’m not implying that the results weren’t going to be interesting, musical [...]