I grabbed my very old, slightly damp-damaged guitar strap off the wall and headed out the door.

It may be as much as fifteen years since I performed standing up with the guitar (and the last time may have been for a game piece by Pedro Rebelo that required a degree of physical and theatrical mobility).

I expected the experience to be physically and psychologically… odd, but I wasn’t prepared for the oddness of keeping my boots on.

And, hey, I never realized how (socio-musically) useful it is to be able to move fro and back as you signal the move from foreground to background.

I figured if I couldn’t carry the 15–20 minutes I’d be playing in the relatively safe space of the Lab without the usual resources (of variable volume envelopes, of the familiar posture), I’d be in trouble playing with the old-timers at OTO. I needed to know….

So I’m up there with John Godfrey: I’ve heard him play over the years, of course, but this was our first on-stage meetings, and I wanted this to be different—to provoke a different kind of music.

And without my usual resources, the volume pedal in particular, I’d figured it would be relatively easy to contrast with John’s highly technically mediated sound (‘sound,’ again, in the afrological sense).

I wanted the performers (myself and John) to work. In a similar maneuver to the encounter with Evan Dorrian, I wanted to create a context in which we’d have to exert effort, to labor; to push him, and, hopefully, to be pushed and pulled in return.

From a curatorial standpoint, however, a problem with this approach is that, as the Lab progresses though the evening, and as many more people engage on-stage (which is a good thing), there’s often gradual downward slope in terms of densities, complexities and energy levels. The format in which the relatively experienced improvisers do their shtick early on during the evening was a created in response to comments from audience members that they desired to witness “how it should (or could) be done” before the relative rookies took to the stage.

But that energy dip….

As curator and club-runner, how might I solve this problem without wrecking the Stet Lab mission? Is it a problem?

Talking to Owen Sutton (drummer) and Tony O’Connor (bass player) after the five (count ’em) guitar ensemble that closed the Lab, I remarked that one of the complications (and one that I worried about prior to the guitar quintet’s performance ten minutes to venue close) stemmed from guitarists generally have bad braking times.

We’re not like our true rhythm section brethren (drummers, bass players, etc.) or our frontline counterparts (horn players, fiddler, vocalists). A braking latency is a trait we share with other idiomatically polyphonic instrumentalists (keyboard players, pianists). Many of us came from the bedroom and can too easily get lost in our little worlds; solipsistic and oblivious to anything but the neat stuff flowing from under our fingers. [Seriously, listen to the track and count how many times you think this happens.]

During the quintet Kevin Terry deploys a moment of near-verbatim quotation. It’s funny and it’s effective.

Sometime later (for me significantly later in the context of this ditty), Enda Buckley also throws one in.

I’m reminded of one student who would, with impeccable timing, while the rest of the ensemble were doing the Make-A-New-Music-Noise-Here routine, would throw in a beautiful open DΔ chord on his guitar at exactly the wrong (thus entirely right) time. It would send the self-fashioned New Music Ensemble reeling from the comfort of its plink-plonks, bloop-bleeps and scratch-crashes.

Fantastic!

This is what Cage never understood. For the Cagian doctrine, all sounds can be sounds as long as it had (ostensibly, and according to culturally and ideologically (and racially) specific criteria) was ‘free’ of history and context. What Cage (and his followers) were barricading themselves from was not convention, but power—the power to disrupt their cozy, easy liberalism.

But that’s a story for some other time….

The pleasure / utility / power of a quote is to throw a big fat spanner into the working of group improvisation.

The drawback / hazard / weakness of a quote can be summed up by the question: now what?

A single quote (as opposed to an explicitly and contiguously idiomatic performance, or a scatter-brained collage of channel-hopping) can have interesting and problematic consequences for interaction. The effectiveness of the quote—to be able to collapse and redirect and improvisation—is also what makes them hard to deal with. Now what? Given that this quote redefined and reconstructed the performance up to this point, now what? I wonder what consequences Kevin and, in particular, Enda were expecting?

The Vortex, London, November 22, 2009

Ingrid Laubrock leans forward, the tenor just about balanced on her right thumb. She shakes the horn, her fingers barely press the keys. There’s a flurry of (imagined? quasi? pseudo?) notes.

Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast, May 16, 2009

First time I hear Justin Yang play, I hear something similar. His approach is nothing like Laubrock’s, but, in Justin’s sound, I hear an approach that seems almost exclusively made-up of these complex of gestures.

To call them ‘extended techniques’ would be problematic; techniques extracurricular to orthodoxy might be a better description.

If I’m making Justin out to be anything like John Butcher, that would also be misleading.

The Vortex, London, November 23, 2009

Henry Grimes is not walking, he’s not playing lines, he’s not holding tones. His left hand shifts in steps, but what you hear is something else. His free fingers—‘articulate’ is so much the wrong word, ‘delineate’ ain’t much better—draw out problematic complexes—clouds of… stuff.

Stet Lab, Cork, December 7, 2009

And Marian Murray does something that’s not a million miles away from Grimes’ technique. Sliding her left hand on the fingerboard, her fingers moving ‘randomly’ (which is not quite the right word), and her bow draws out unexpected harmonics sound one register then another. She creates unpredictable, angular, jumpy phrases through deploying a, when you break it down, simple technique.

The term ‘randomly’ articulates the problematic of improvisation in our consciousness.

If I were to switch on my Composer’s Brain™ (© 1971, Pierre Boulez Inc.) for a moment, I might have heard echos of Ligeti in Grimes’ playing.

…or maybe Xenakis.

Chick Lyall once remarked that improvisers are, in a sense, lazy. He claims an inspiration in Xenakis, but responds to this inspiration with his own improvisative ‘shortcuts’ to obtain analogous results.

These terms (‘lazy,’ ‘shortcut,’ ‘random,’ etc.) articulate the problematic of improvisation in our composerly consciousness.

Another one of my teachers, Richard Barrett, also sees Xenakis as an inspiration—as model—and also problamtizes the boundary between improvisation and composition.

And how did I and Justin arrive here? Both of us with teachers from both the AACM and (so-called) New Complexity?

Department of Music, Edinburgh, date uncertain, 1996?

I remember watching Pedro Rebelo hit some clusters on the piano.

Let me rephrase that.

I remember watching Pedro Rebelo ripple some clusters on the piano. It’s almost fractal—characterized by a self-similarity—a technique for embedding detail and information at different scales.

The effect is almost an information over saturation while avoiding the homogeneity of noise.

On the guitar, I first encounter a technique for generating this kind of complexity in Fred Frith’s playing, and later, almost by accident, I’d find a technique to do that myself.

I’d later call these techniques, for lack of an, AFAIK, existing term, ‘futzing.’

Teaching this technique—‘throwing your hands around the fingerboard and hoping for the best’ or ‘sweeping though the strings and catching a surprise’—turned out, I’d later discover, to be a difficult thing to do.

How do you teach something that is so under theorized? (and how did Coltrane, Taylor, Sanders learn/develope it?) Neither ‘intentional’ (‘deliberate’ and ‘authorial’) nor ‘noise’ (e.g. the Cagian denial of agency). These things—‘noise’/‘intention’—exist on a line, and it isn’t so much about riding the border between them, but steeping off that line. We want to enter a space that is not about control, nor the lack of it, but about surprises, densities and irregularities; about relationships—differences and negotiations… maybe cyborgs.

As someone said elsewhere:

Let me put my cards on the table at this point and say, that for me, virtuosity is a significant element in how I relate to the instrument, how I relate to performance, and how I approach improvisation. Leave aside that vision of a raw, competitive, athletics concept, and I might argue for virtuosity as an interface between the instrument and the instrumentalist. If performance in general, and improvisation in particular, is the (re)enactment and (re)negotiation of identities, boundaries and relationships, then the space between actors (human and non-human) must be a site of (re)construction and (trans)formation.

I suppose what I might be arguing for is, taking my hat off to Donna Haraway, a cyborg improviser—the (un)natural, contradictory, partial identity that is techno-organism (Haraway, 1991). Should I insist on the stable category of human (me), or the stable category of the artifact (guitar), or the hard-edged boundary that separates us, no music can be made. It is in the re-negotiations, and the fluid motions, of the boundaries, the (temporary) creation of hybrids and networks that music (as side-effect) can be improvised.

Virtuosity, to me, means the confusion and connectedness of the (blurry) categories of the musical, the social, the cultural and the technological. On a good day I’m not sure where the cultural ends and the technological starts. Sometimes I wonder if my body stops at my fingertips, or whether it continues through to the fingerboard….

references

Haraway, Donna J. (1991), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge), pp. 149-181.