The evening will open a performance by Helena Reilly (voice), Kevin Terry (guitar) and Dan Walsh (drums).

Should be a good one. We hope to see y’all there! Han-earl, who will be stepping down from curatorial duties with this event, would like to thank everyone who supported the Lab over the last 3+ years!

…In the meantime, here’s a couple of contrasting clips of Davis in action. With Matthew Bourne and Dave Kane:

…and with Pedro Rebelo and Franziska Schroeder:

Stet Lab featuring Stephen Davis
with Han-earl Park plus Helena Reilly, Kevin Terry and Dan Walsh

Monday, 7 February 2011

9:00 pm (doors: 8:45 pm)

Upstairs @ The Roundy [map…]
Castle Street
Cork, Ireland

€10 (€5)

Cork’s monthly improvised music event, Stet Lab, is thrilled to be presenting the Cork debut of Belfast-based drummer, improviser and composer Stephen Davis on Monday, 7 February 2011, upstairs at The Roundy, Castle Street, Cork, Ireland.

Hailed by Jazzwise magazine as “a very empathetic performer with a strong percussive voice”, Stephen Davis is a composer, performer, and a rising star of the younger generation of alt. jazzers. Davis is best know as a member of Bourne/Davis/Kane (with Matthew Bourne, Dave Kane) whose records The Money Notes (FogHorn Records) was given four out of five stars, and described as “an intelligent set, in which familiar trio materials are cherished, polished and pared down” by John Fordham in The Guardian. His other records include Moment To Moment (Slam Productions) with Paul Dunmall, and Faint (Creative Sources Recordings) with Franziska Schroeder and Pedro Rebelo.

Davis has performed with some of the best known names in jazz and improvised music including Evan Parker, Joe Morris, Django Bates, Brian Irvine, Reggie Washington, Tom Arthurs, Julian Seigal, Mike Walker, Norma Winston, Rufus Reid and Mark Ribot. He has toured extensively in Europe, America, Russia and elsewhere, and has written music film, dance and theatre. In 2010 Davis helped to instigate the Evan Parker-led 20-piece improvising ensemble as part of the Sonorities Festival (Belfast), and in 2009 Davis was commission to write an original work for the Belfast Festival.

Davis will be joined by Cork-based improvisers including guitarist, and founder of Stet Lab and Mathilde 253, Han-earl Park. The event will open with a performance by a trio of up-and-coming Cork-based improvisers, The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) Of, consisting of vocalist Helena Reilly, guitarist Kevin Terry and drummer Dan Walsh.

The event will begin at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm) and entry is €10 (€5).

Stet Lab will return in March 2011 for more real-time, on-stage musical meetings!

the performers

Stephen Davis is a drummer mainly but also composes music. Over the years he has had the opportunity to play music professionally with Evan Parker, Joe Morris, Matthew Bourne, Dave Kane, Django Bates, Brian Irvine, Reggie Washington, Tom Arthurs, Julian Seigal, Paul Dunmall, Mike Walker, Norma Winston, Rufus Reid, Mark Ribot…. and the list goes on. He has toured all over Europe, America, Russia and many other countries with different ensembles.

He has music published on Edition Records with ‘Bourne/Davis/Kane’, on Creative Sources Recordings with ‘Faint,’ and on Slam Records with Paul Dunmall.
As a composer he has written music for various projects including film, dance and theatre as well as his own various ensembles. In October 2009 Stephen was commission to write an original work for the Belfast Festival for a large group.

“A very empathetic performer with a strong percussive voice.”

(Jazzwise)

Improviser, guitarist and constructor Han-earl Park works from/within/around traditions of fuzzily idiomatic, on occasion experimental, mostly open improvised musics, sometimes engineering theater, sometimes inventing ritual. He feels the gravitational pull of collaborative, multi-authored contexts, and has performed in clubs, theaters, art galleries and concert halls in Europe and America.

He is involved in collaborations with Bruce Coates, Franziska Schroeder, Alex Fiennes and Murray Campbell, and is part of Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith. Recent performances include Mathilde 253 with Lol Coxhill; duo concerts with Paul Dunmall, and with Richard Barrett; trios with Matana Robers and Mark Sanders, with Kato Hideki and Katie O’Looney, and with Thomas Buckner and Jesse Ronneau; as part of the Evan Parker led 20-piece improvising ensemble; and the performance of Pauline Oliveros’ ‘Droniphonia’ alongside the composer. His recordings have been released by labels including Slam Productions, and DUNS Limited Edition. He has appeared at festivals including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival (California), dialogues festival (Edinburgh), Sonorities (Belfast) and VAIN Live Art (Oxford).

Park founded and curates Stet Lab and teaches improvisation at the UCC School of Music.

Dan Walsh is a Cork-based drummer studying for a BMus degree at UCC, working within a variety of contexts though specialising in jazz. Having begun playing at the somewhat late age of 16 Dan has already had the privilege of playing with some of the country’s top jazz musicians such as Richie Buckley, Myles Drennan and Micheal Buckley. Currently providing the beat for The Roaring Forties as well as running a monthly Blue Note jazz night, Dan continues to play in as many varying situations as possible in order to continue developing musically.

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.

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 keep out of each others’ way.”

“That’s right; that’s the algorithm.”

Stet Lab, Cork, May 11, 2009

Bruce Coates, Jonny Marks and myself:

‘is that it? (because I’m going crazy)’

this is getting familiar…

I’ve played with Bruce on and off for a few years now. After the first few not-exactly-problem-free performances (getting to know each other—Fizzle, Birmingham, November 7, 2006; interesting navigations—FrImp, Birmingham, November 1, 2007; competent but polite—Stet Lab, Cork, November 8; first crash and burn—Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, November 9), we’ve found our vibe.

We have, all things considered, relatively quickly learned that we can’t easily break each other, and we can throw in the kitchen sink without (too much) fear—without worrying about whether we can handle the result.

…But the results, well… I’ve wondered about this before, but I’ll ask again: am I getting too comfortable (complacent)? I want to give that question a slightly different spin this time: if, as I’ve stated elsewhere, difference is both sustainable and necessary (or at least desirable) in group improvisation, then should the mode, or context, of expressing difference (a kind of on-stage political protocol) also be variable?

…Does that make any sense?

taking the back seat

With Jonny delivering so much of the drama (and comedy), I feel I can take a back seat—a position that I’m happy to occupy (to own). I can coax certain elements from back here—highlighting this, discouraging that—all the while safe in the knowledge that all ears are on the two standing in from of me. This reminds me (tactically, not musically) of my days in the rhythm section of the (truly mediocre) university big band….)

Since I heard, a few weeks prior to the gig, that Jonny was a throat singer, I’ve wondered how much of my playing would (should?) evoke a kind of compatibility… no, better, affinity. There is, for example, a quasi-jaw harp effect that I do (used to be a (near-)cliché with the Church of Sonology performances) that somewhat resembles (to my uncultured ears) certain forms of overtone singing. Fast forward towards the end of ‘is that it? (because I’m going crazy) part 1’ (about the 10:50 mark). I arrive at at this quasi-jaw harp effect, trying to tempt Jonny to do that thing. When I feel he has caught on, I gradually pull back, making the result a little more oblique.

That, incidentally, is a gross simplification: there was a lot more going on—hedging of bets, tactical anticipations and adaptations—but I want to tell a simpler story today.

I do this, not with any particular mission to interrupt, but because I want the listening experience to be rich and interesting. If you’re sharp, you’d have caught it, made connections, and patted yourself on the back for being a clever listener; if not, well, no biggie, hopefully there’s enough complexity to provide ear-candy and (unintended) connections.

Somewhere in Belfast, May 16, 2009

Snippets from a conversation between three teachers of improvised music:

“I don’t know why students feel the need to park their idiom at the door.”

“Who play ‘real’ music….”

“There’s this fantastic musician who’s a fantastic… they can do bossa, they can….”

“…they can play….”

“Yeah, they can actually play, but when it comes to improvised music, it’s all bloop-bleep….”

“What’s with that?”

Stet Lab, Cork, May 11, 2009

Bruce, Jonny, Paul Dowling, Owen Sutton and myself:

‘loosened up a whole bunch of stuff’

questions for loopers

Based on a conversation between Paul, Owen and myself after ‘loosened up a whole bunch of stuff’, here’s three questions for all you delay-heads and loopers out there:

Why is it that when many of you deploy these devices, the loops are in beautifully crafted, well defined simple meters? I’ve got no problem with simple meters, but many of these electronic devices will happily loop 79/16 or √2/2 until it is blue in the face (except, to make a Zappa-esque observation, it’d never get blue in the face).

Why do so many of you never abruptly stop (or mute) a loop? Surely that effect could be stark, unexpected and, potentially, dramatic.

Why are the majority of loops in the medium scale (in the region of one to six seconds)? Why don’t you loop in units of the very short, or, with modern devices, the very long?

Here’s a little back-story: in my first semi-public attempts as an improvising guitarist, I had my guitar, amp and volume pedal… plus a compressor, a distortion box, a delay pedal and a chorus unit. Eventually, this chain would be joined by a wah. (I did, incidentally, my first recordings (a piece by Pedro Rebelo) with more or less this complex of equipment.)

Why am I going through this guitar-geek fetish confession? I started as an improvising guitarist of the ‘if-only-I-had-a-gizmo-I-would-rock’ school of wishful, self-delusion. Somewhere in my head, I had this naive idea that what separated me from the Frisells and Friths of the world was the hardware. (Oh, I almost got myself, don’t laugh, an SG thinking that this would get me closer to Frisell and Zappa.)

Yet Bailey never got better than with a guitar, terrible sounding fuzz box, a volume pedal and amp. Heck, Braxton, age 24, got two LPs from a single alto.

Who was I kidding here?

I only got through my personal-political-musical-technical hiccups and hang-ups by jettisoning, first the wah, then the compressor and delay, and eventually the distortion and the chorus boxes.

Fast-forward to the present…

I feel I’ve melowed from my fundamentalist, luddite stance from years ago, but, as I sat watching Katie O’Looney setup her behemoth kit, as I helped her carry her atomized percussion setup out of her van, up the stairs, into the performance space, I couln’t quite figure out what I was feeling.

My mentors include those who enroll gargantuan complex of musical resources and those who do not. How do I figure in this equation? There are, of course, pragmatic dimensions to this (I travel from one gig to another, by and large, via public transport), but nonetheless what are the political/ideological implications of subscribing to one position?

Part choice, perhaps: I did, for example, suggest to Owen Sutton that he might want to “decide whether you’re an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drummer (a la Tony Oxley), or happier with a more spartan approach (like Joey Baron). Neither [is] the wrong choice, of course….” Sure, neither’s wrong, but neither are they neutral; they have very different implications and possibilities.

Stet Lab celebrates its first birthday with saxophonist Franziska Schroeder

Monday, November 10th 2008

9:00 pm (doors: 8:45 pm)

Upstairs @ The Roundy [map…]
Castle Street
Cork, Ireland

€10 (€5)

One year after the launch of Cork’s monthly improvisation event, Stet Lab returns on Monday, 10th November to its very first venue—upstairs at The Roundy. To celebrate this anniversary, Stet Lab will be inviting both regular participants and newcomers, and welcoming special guest, the Belfast-based extraordinary saxophonist-improviser-theorist Franziska Schroeder.

If real-time sonic deviance is something that you enjoy, then Franziska Schroeder’s saxophone prowess is definitely not to be missed. Her technique is quick and virtuosic: every second of the improvisation brings a new dimension to the performance (switch off for an instant and you will be left wondering how the sonic landscape changed). Having a sound and approach that sets her in a league of her own, it is unsurprising that Schroeder has a distinguished background that includes a fellowship at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast.

Schroeder is the founder of the digital media collective l a u t, and was the artistic director of the ICMC Roots Ensemble. She has released a double CD with her trio FAINT (with pianist Pedro Rebelo and drummer Steven Davis), and May There Be… (with Rebelo, ’cellist Guilherme Rodrigues and violist Ernesto Rodrigues), both on the Creative Source Recordings label.

“Over the past twelve month, Stet Lab has successfully presented ten events and welcomed a dozen guest artists,” said Stet Lab founder and curator Han-earl Park, who will also be performing with Schroeder. “I’m pleased and excited to launch our second year of onstage mutations and hybrids with an event featuring Franziska Schroeder; I cannot think of any better musician with whom to celebrate Stet Lab’s first birthday.”

Also performing at the event will be a group of Cork-based improvisers, Veronica Tadman (voice), Paul Dowling (bass) and Barry Twomey (guitar), appearing as The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) of….

The event will begin at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm) and entry is €10 (€5).

Stet Lab’s Winter 2008 season will continue at The Roundy on Monday, 8th 9th December featuring another saxophonist, Birmingham-based Bruce Coates.

updates:

12-05-08 change date of December Lab from 8th to 9th.