I’m indebted to those who have told stories of, and given advice on, running no- or low-budget ventures elsewhere. My thanks to Mike Hurley (Fizzle, Brimingham), Lin Zhang (Grind Sight Open Eye, Edinburgh), Hugh Metcalfe (The Klinker, London), Paul Harrison (Classic Anxiety Dream (RIP), Edinburgh), Phil Morton (Frakture, Liverpool) and John Russell (Mopomoso, London) for their cautionary tales and hints & tips. In particular, I’d like to thank Bruce Coates (FrImp, Birmingham) and Stuart Revill (Safehouse, Brighton) who gave tangible, concrete pointers about the dos and don’ts of such a venture prior to, and just after, the very first Stet Lab in November 2007. I am also grateful to Alex Fiennes and Martin Parker (directors of the, by comparison, more ambitious and grander dialogues, Edinburgh) for their advice. Many things I’ll be saying here are derived or adapted from the suggestions and practices of these people and their organizations.

Thus the first piece of advice…

if it ain’t broke

I’ve said in the past that, regarding my guitar playing, I don’t have a single original bone in my body. The same would apply to how I try and run Stet Lab. Almost everything we’ve done comes from someone / somewhere else. Guest plus jam-session formats comes from Fizzle; a ‘safe’ testbed for new improvisers—Safehouse; prioritizing audio recordings—dialogues; etc.

Stuart Revill said that there’s a surface appearance of freewheeling looseness with Safehouse when, in fact, it is tightly controlled. Phil Morton said that there’s enough chaos in the music so the organizational aspects should be as structured as possible.

Keep the day-to-day operation of your club, and the stage management of the performance, as professional and efficiently executed as possible so that, on the night of the performance, the music can fly in all dimensions.

the mission

After the bruising January 2008 Lab, I drafted the mission statement to clear this up with everybody and anybody who might want to be involved in Stet Lab. (I even felt a need to articulate what Stet Lab was not.)

This statement was partly inspired by the guidance document that Safehouse used that Stuart Revill showed me. Although the Safehouse guidelines were created for a slightly different purpose from Stet Lab’s mission statement, it’s good to be clear about the long-term objectives of your club. Having a clear mission helps decisions about what’s important and what’s not. It also clears up with your collaborators, and especially with your short-term allies, what you need from them and what they can get from you.

…And, just as importantly, it will remind you why you’re doing what you are doing, helping you through the setbacks and low points (of which there will be plenty).

[Incidentally, the tug-and-pull I experienced during, and immediately after, the January 2008 Lab was partly as a result of two ventures, one by the Quiet Club and another by Tony Langlois, imploding. Stet Lab was originally going to be sandwiched in a week between those other monthly events, offering a newcomer / jam-session niche between the two more tightly programmed entities. It was an odd experience resisting the pull of two forces trying to invest Stet Lab with the dreams of those defunct projects.]

scene building

the improvisative: selling a verb

Most clubs or regular events are promoting, and riding on the recognition of, names (of performers, bands, songs, genres, styles, etc.). They are, in short, selling a product—an object (or near enough to one that performed music can ever become). Stet Lab has a problem in this landscape in that we are largely in the business of selling a process (and not one that you can necessarily take home with you). This can be a difficult thing to promote, and I’ve fallen back on largely meaningless and/or misleading terms such as ‘improvised music’ or ‘free jazz’. Stick in there, and I think that you can cultivate an audience who recognizes practice as the focal criteria.

[Of course 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. However, I will have to plead guilty to the charge of exercising a (*ahem*) contingent form of bias since, as a no-budget event, most of the visiting performers are my friends and/or colleagues.]

…But other factors keep getting in the way. I’ve been disappointed, for example, in the New Music™ vocabulary that dominates Stet Lab. It’s as if it—the post-War, European and Euro-American quirks, habits and reflexes—signifies some kind of musical neutral ground. I wonder, especially when first-timers hit the stage, what compels people to disengage their non-New Music™ idioms and traditions—their other identities—when confronted by an open improvisative context. (I’ve never discouraged someone from playing the blues, to sing a song, and I’ve often queried musicians afterwards about why they did not.)

I also feel we missed our opportunity in engaging the broader musical community (and with improvisers from a more overtly idiomatic position) in Cork after the juggernaut that was the January Lab. I’ve mourned this, and tried to rectify it on occasion, but I have no plans to address it… for the moment.

guest artists

Here’s my (partial, situated) characterization of Stet Lab’s home town. The local scene is too comfortable for my tastes. Everyone has their place, and, for me, what passes for improvisation has a smell of a celebration of transcendental vanilla identity and social statis. I want difference and dissent and newcomers and outsiders and visitors to permanently infect the performances at Stet Lab.

I also don’t want a space in which newcomers to improvised music (performers and audience) get intimidated (i.e. ‘know their place’); I want it to be welcoming (although, I worry that I too might be subscribing to a notion of middle-class, transcendental upward mobility).

One more piece of advice: don’t overload one event with guest artists (don’t do the January 2008 Lab). If you do that, you run out of steam real quick, and you can lose sight of the space for newcomers.

[We’re currently not in a great financial situation in regards to guest artists. Currently, we pay door money that can range from €10 to 120 for the guest artist. Ideally, I’d like to move to a situation in which we can guarantee a fee (even if small) for the performers, but this is not going to happen until we transform Stet Lab into a formal organization, and we gain some kind of external support.]

gender makeup of Stet Lab

Difficult issue to crack. Bruce Coates and I have had long discussions about the ‘macho’ aspect of much improvised music. I suspect that (as Phil Morton has pointed out), the ‘old boys’ network’ that underlies the small (if scattered) tribes of improviser-musicians is also partly to blame.

Stet Lab had been doing reasonably well until June 2008, but… sorry, no magic pill, but it doesn’t get solved without a lot of work. Acknowledge it and address it.

student population

Music students of a formal educational institution have, for better or worse, been the single largest minority in the Stet Lab-verse. They are curious, adventurous and, by-and-large, unafraid of failure. They are, in many respects, the perfect model of an improviser.

The College Student Syndrome, on the other hand, does sometimes hang-around the Lab like a albatross when dealing with bureaucrats and funding bodies. The presence of student performers can also, for reasons that I’ve never been able to understand, intimidate other (rookie) improvisers. (Can someone please explain this to me?)

However, I agree with Mike Hurley that it’s good to have students involved, and as UCC is AFAIK the biggest single employer in Cork, I find it weird that funding bodies would avoid us for that reason.

audience

inside and outside

Minority interest musical practices can be prone to cliques. Especially in a small town, the in crowd know each other, and this can be intimidating to newcomers.

Bruce advised me that you should try and recognize people, learn their names, greet them at each event if possible. There’s no magic pill, but you need to open this social space up without removing the possibility of connoisseurship (you want, perhaps, to create an environment in which newcomers can develop connoisseurship).

…And examine your prejudices: avoid the expectation that your audience come from certain classes, identities, genders, ethnicities, races, nationalities, colors, shapes or sizes. (No, I haven’t fully learned this one either, but, as per Franziska Schroeder’s excellent suggestion, I’ve recently distributed posters to Cork’s language schools….)

publicity

Having a regular space and a regular time and calendar spot helps, but you still need to find your audience. Here some potential routes: flyers, posters, press and online resources.

Flyers: This I learned from Bruce: Go to every ‘compatible’ event in town (left-field jazz concerts, experimental music festivals, talks by visiting improvisers, etc.) and flyer everyone who comes out the door.

Posters: I have no idea how well this works. I have only three concrete cases where the poster caught someone’s attention, and of those, only two came to a performance.

Press: This divides into press releases and listings. Again, I know of only one case in which someone came to a Lab because of a local listing (and we’ve never seen him since). Press visibility, however, may help any future funding application, and can persuade visiting (and local) artists that we are at least serious.

Online resources: This, to some extent, is circular. The more press releases and listing that you can get online, the higher your google ranking; the higher the google ranking the greater visibility you have… You may also consider some of the usual, legit SEO optimization tricks.

However, I don’t know if this brings new audience in, but it’s a good way of keeping in touch with your existing base. This is especially important for last minute notifications of changes such as when a venue shifts you around…

venues

Looking for, and finding, a suitable space for improvised music ain’t easy. Especially, if you want a jam session model, you want a space that is relatively informal, perhaps intimate (concert spaces can scare the newcomer to improvisation). I’ve also gravitated towards a small- or no-PA situation since it helps train those of us who have greater resources in terms of volume to be sensitive to the quieter voices, and it greatly reduces setup time (again, a significant issue in jam session contexts).

Here the Stet Lab check list:

• Reasonable acoustics for unamplified instruments.
• We’re allowed to charge at the door, and, in order to charge at the door, we need…
• …a separate room from the main bar/public area.
• Free of charge (or at least low rent) since we don’t make enough to pay the performers nearly enough.
• Access to a bar (helps to keep the vibe informal—session-like).

Audience tend to come to off-the-wall, out-of-the-ordinary events if they know when and where they are held. You greatly increase your chances of holding on to your audience if your event occurs at the same place at the same time (currently, in our case, the second Monday of the month at 9 pm), so keeping things running like clockwork helps.

Here’s another thing that I learned from Bruce: check the booking with the venues, then double check maybe a week prior to the event, and then check again a few days prior. In the brief period in which the Lab has been operating, we’ve had almost every conceivable venue problem: double bookings, mysterious disappearances of the booking, bookings on the wrong day, venues that suddenly decide to charge us rent, venues that lose their music license, and, most spectacularly, venues that get torn down. Having a contingency plan is handy (as we’ve resorted to the University concert hall), but you will lose a significant portion of your audience every time you resort to it.

get a team

I don’t do this alone, and I couldn’t (probably wouldn’t) do this alone. A very, very big thanks to all the Stet Lab (ir)regulars, past and present. In particular, Veronica Tadman and Kevin Terry presently, and Eoin Callery in the past, have served this enterprise well beyond the call of duty. I’m also grateful to Anne-Marie Curtin and Nicki Ffrench Davis for their help in the early days when Stet Lab was the odd-ball offshoot of the Cork Music Collective (RIP).

The events just would just not have happened, and the Lab have likely imploded in the first few month, without them.

however…

…beware of people who talk-the-talk, but don’t turn up; people who (a) say that they would be involved if only such-and-such (the person with the vision gets the job), (b) want to run before we can walk (suggest some whizz-bang, spectacularly time consuming addition to the monthly event), or (c) people who say something is easy, but will not commit to doing any work. I recommend that you see if people are willing turn up every month, help in a low-level, low-key way, before asking them to start their grand plan. Alternatively, ask them to execute their grand plan for, say, three months before going official or public with it (a test run to see if they have the long-term stamina to keep it up).

You need to make judgment calls, weighing the amount of time needed to execute a project vs. the benefits given the long-term aims of your club. (For example, video documentation would be nice, but no professional improvising musicians that I know can turn (even indirectly) video into income of any kind, and it is enormously time consuming to edit and process on our part.)

It’s often good to remind people that there’s nothing wrong with ‘just’ being an audience member or ‘just’ a performer. You really have to be committed to the enterprise, and get a big, big, big kick out of witnessing improvised music (sometimes bad, often indifferent, only on occasion spectacular, although always fascinating) every month for you to labor behind the scenes of an entity like Stet Lab. Getting something like the Lab running is mostly unglamorous drudgery, time consuming and frustrating, and that’s (understandably) not for most people.

is it worth it?

am I club-runner or performer?

John Russell told me that he set up Mopomoso partly to give himself a space to perform. It’s taken me almost a year to come to terms with this, but there’s similar motivations for continuing with Stet Lab.

Early on, I felt I needed some curatorial (and ideological) distance between my own take on improvisation, performance and music, and Stet Lab’s ongoing practice. To that end, I removed myself from performing as part of four Labs (January to April, 2008), but I’ve since decided that such curatorial ‘objectivity’ doesn’t much make sense, and I need remind myself that I define myself primarily as an improviser-performer, and only by necessity am I a club-runner.

congratulations, you’re a club-runner

Whether you would want to organize a regular improvised music event depends on what you’re looking to gain from it. Stet Lab, for me, is partly a long-term scene-building exercise; it is, at times, a place of research into the pedagogical, sociological and political dimensions of improvisative practice; an excuse to bring over practitioners whose work I am excited about; and a place to play.

Good luck, and let me know of your experiences and please share your stories.

Anyway what’s this got to do with Stet Lab? Well I found that January’s Lab was easily the healthiest lab yet: there was an electric atmosphere, there was a crowd and the improvisations kicked ass! Something just seem to click and after the mishaps of the December Lab it was definitely well rewarded. The Roundy cannot possibly ‘double book’ again because the ratio of punters between upstairs and downstairs was invertly proportional (i.e there were more people at the Lab than casually drinking downstairs).

I cannot quite figure out what was the key factor that made this months Lab stand out above the rest: Was it Murray? Was it the large crowd? The press release that constantly went on about a party? Whatever it was, it worked and I hope that we can learn from this Lab because it proved that Stet Lab can be a worthy event on the monthly Cork social calendar.

But between those two, for me, lies an interesting gray area (I encounter this situation less often than the other two).

If group improvisation is a kind of social negotiation, you’re often trying to figure out what options you have, and what position(s) you might occupy within the group. With that in mind, let me walk you through the three improvisations by Jesse Ronneau, Veronica Tadman and myself (Han-earl Park).

speeds of gestures and decision making

That would be speeds, as in apparent lack of, and decision making, as in many, many choices carefully considered and, for the most part, abandoned before sounded.

Jesse Ronneau’s a very different kind of improviser. I have no background in after-Darmstadt European or Euro-American noise, and I doubt Jesse has much of a taste for after-AACM creative musics. Certainly my interactions with him contrasts greatly with those between myself and, say, Murray Campbell. Jesse’s bass playing has a kind of inertia (I don’t mean that in a bad way); slow, deliberate, often in holding position around which you’re invited to orbit, sounds that you are invited to contrast with, pauses in which you can end up second guessing yourself (a kind of parallel trap to the one I fell into in July).

Throw into the mix Veronica Tadman’s wetware instrument (her voice) which cleverly resisted occupying the foreground to Jesse and my hardware instruments’ background (which was, according to my own musical prejudices, where it ‘should’ be), and I find a context that’s sometimes difficult to navigate.

Let me clarify this: there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with what either Jesse and Veronica were doing, but since the aggregate network behavior was alien to my sensibilities, I had to quickly figure out how I might make my contributions ‘work’ (however you define that) in that situation.

I often felt like I was clutching at straws, and if there was a kind of guiding principle to this, it might be summed up with Anthony Braxton’s description of Paul Desmond:

He [Desmond] had already plotted out five seconds ahead of time what he was gonna do, and you could hear it in his music. It looked like he was a very slow player, but in fact he was making very quick decisions…. He was far ahead of what you heard: what you heard had been edited completely….

Anthony Braxton quoted in Graham Lock (1988), Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-Reality of Creative Music (London: Quartet), pp. 62–63.

Searching for a way to operate in this group, I was trying to reach Braxton’s Desmond in my musical personality (i.e. carefully considering many choices, but selectively executing only a small number of them). And that’s not a position I’ve tried to occupy in a long time (possibly since the Church of Sonology amplification in Edinburgh, 2002). It turned out, however, to be an interesting scheme for generating tactics in real-time, if not one that I feel compelled to return to.

I think, to some extent, all three of us were being Braxton’s Desmond that evening, and now, looking back on it, I wonder if it may have been more fruitful if I had tried to be someone else. I only realized this when talking to Jesse after the performance. I told him that, towards the second-half of ‘a sad and twisted story’, I had chosen an (un-Desmond-like) simple strategy—a conditional behavior. I would continue with near-silent moments interspersed with Sforzando psuedo-clusters until the other performers had changed their gestures significantly. Turns out Jesse had realized what was happening and thus refused to budge, and, for me, that was one of the more interesting things I contributed that evening.

some random observations

Like July, wasn’t this an awfully male Lab? Having done not too badly on the gender front (at least until June), I think there’s going to have to be some hard work ahead trying to redress this issue. Not to take away anything from Veronica’s contributions, but the departure of a couple of Stet Lab (ir)regulars has left difficult gaps to fill.

So we’re back in the formal space of the Ó Riada Hall. This makes certain interactions with the audience harder (in particular, trying to encourage people to sit-in), but November’s Lab will be in The Roundy which I hope will prove to be less intimidating, and open to ad-hoc associations.

This is mostly due to my recent lack of effort (due to a lack of time!) inviting, prior to the event, people to sit-in, but I had problems with the recital-like nature of this performance; it gets us away from the Lab’s mission.

Okay, let me walk you though my misguided attempts at putting that square piece into that triangular hole on July 10th.

you have to answer them

Go to the recordings from July and have a listen to Tony O’Connor and my duet (entitled ‘you have to answer them’) that opened the Lab.

Duets are hard, and listening back now, I think Tony did some very fine playing on that.

On the other hand, I’m not at all impressed by the guitarist’s playing. Like I said, I still can’t shake that post-Campbell pseudo-bluegrass. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, so I figure I take that bluegrass line for a walk. Unlike June, however, this time the results sounded a little too forced (triangular block into circular hole). I’m still trying to figure out how much milage I have on this collection of disparate techniques (held together by their idiomatic associations), and, from my point of view, my playing never quite took-off in the July Lab.

At the time of performance, in fact, it was Tony’s contribution that was more interesting to listen to. At points, it felt like I was only providing filler material.

One thought that flashed through my mind during that duet:

This might be a good time to pause; have a change in texture / density / orchestration / social make-up; let Tony have a solo….

Good idea, huh? Except doublethink kicks in:

Uh-oh, wonder if Tony’d feel like he’s stuck out there by himself… Seconds thoughts, better not drop out right now.

I’ve talked to some of the Stet Lab (ir)regulars about this off-line, but sometimes I seem to be the one holding the group back in performance. Listening back to, for example ‘evening echo’, it’s the guitarist holding the group back. Marian Murray, Neil O’Loghlen and Veronica Tadman do not need me to make concessions. They know how to swim, and I don’t need to provide the floatation device.

And that’s my problem during my duet with Tony: an unjustified lack of trust in Tony’s abilities. I think I’m still stuck thinking that I’m performing in a classroom context, and not in the big bad world.

I really gotta unlearn that!

Now, when Eoin Callery joined in (on ‘let me have the funny hat’), that was a different story. Not exactly musically successful perhaps (but let’s not dwell on that), but at least I didn’t feel like there was a lack of trust. Wonder why…

exactly like next time

Mike Hurley’s solo (‘heard in my foot’) was fantastic. One of thing I caught in his solo was a kind of physicality—a corporeal logic—in its construction. However accurate this observation was, I (right or wrong) felt an affinity towards this mode of musical construction; an affinity that maybe bordered on familiarity.

So far, so good, but here’s where I make a mistake: I think

Hey, I could do that!

When, before you go up on stage, you imagine how compatible you might be with what is on-stage, you’ve doomed the possibilities. It’s like being a little too enthusiastic on your first date by, say, jumping straight to talk of marriage; the multitude of possibilities of what that relationship could be collapses.

It didn’t work out too badly (on the appropriately enough entitled ‘exactly like next time’), but my playing misses something. It misses, for example, the interplay between Eoin Callery’s and Mike’s pianos. It misses Tony and Neil’s busy bass frequency sounds that threaten to (but never quite) blow every other sound out of the room. Again, I was preempting the music.

The best thing I did was to bow out, and let the quartet finish the performance.

some random observations

The closest thus far that Stet Lab has got to a free jazz gig: ‘it’s gotta be worth something’ and ‘bass player have a light?’

Curating Stet Lab is an art, not a science…. No, better yet, curating Stet Lab is like organizing a faith exercise; like running a klugy, ill-thought-out cult meeting: now we breathe, er, now we go over here, um, light some candles, not we chant, and, er… oh, now we go back and sit in this little box…and, er, chant some more…. I’m still figuring out the ropes, folks, and this change to a more formal space of the Ó Riada Hall didn’t help none. I’m never quite sure how much hand-holding and stage direction we need or want (especially as I want to only put enough topdown direction as to make it run without hitch, but little enough so that the performers can initiate direction).

Marian starts-off both ‘it’s gotta be worth something’ and ‘they’re going to demolish the music department’, yet the two performances go very, very different directions. (Certainly Kevin Terry was not about to go into the free jazz realm.) Wonder how she felt about that? Her playing on ‘they’re going to demolish the music department’ was very different from her usual nonstop bursts of scratches and noise. A lovely, relaxed, chill’d (almost lounge-like) end to an exciting evening of music with Mr. Hurley.

Even taking into account Marian’s very valuable contributions, jeez, was this the most male Stet Lab (at least since January’s)? The last minute change of venue and earlier start time seems to have also played havoc with our testosterone levels.

one question

Was this too much music to absorb as an audience member? Melanie L. Marshall remarked that improvised music requires a lot of concentrated engagement from the audience, and that, as wonderful as the music was, without the bar breaks, it was perhaps a little too much information for the ears. What do you think?

Anyway, it began with several short burst to get things started, from the house band of the evening. This comprised Eoin Callery (mountain dulcimer), Susan Geaney (flute), Tony O’Connor (bass guitar) and Barry Twomey (guitar). A very well behaved bass player who could have crush the puny acoustic forces, swelled and tinkered over the guitar and dulcimer duel. There were funny capo positions creating slidable bridges, randomly inserted beer mats, all manner of slides, and more picking devices than you can pick a string with. At one point there may possibly have been a few chords, but it all just happened so fast; a mass of plucked strings creating an infectious groove infecting any possibility of an healthy infectious groove developing. In the meantime the flute just wouldn’t stop, which is a good thing—moving from key clicks to blown vowel sounds and the occasional jet whistle………… that folks, was what it was all about. Marian Murray (violin) and Kevin Terry (guitar) joined for a round, altering the timbre nicely, with some semi-suggested riffs from Kevin, and “101 things to do with a violin” from Marian.

After a short break for cigarettes and bar trips, the main performer of the evening took the floor. Murray Campbell (violin), was joined by Marian Murray (violin) and Han-earl Park (guitar); Murray proposing, “101 other things to be done with a violin”, in dialogue with Marian—the combination of the two violins was sometimes like a “Pinky and the Brain” string ensemble plot to take over the world—was assisted by some short contribution from Han, for two 10 minuet trios. The contrast in bowing still, and slightly detuned long sustained tones duets passages just captivated the listeners, before abruptly stopping allowing the listener to be mugged by the ensuing hectic and dense finger work of both players. This was Murray’s second appearance at Stet Lab, but in my opinion this new venue allowed many of the subtleties of his playing to be heard much more clearly. His movement from long-sustained tone, multiple examples of melodic phrasing, and rapid combinations of whistle-tones, harmonics, bow scrapings, plucking and rhythmic taps—especially during the second trio—left nobody in doubt of his abilities and obvious comfort in many violin/fiddle styles. For the rest of the evening—with Murray at the helm—the other musicians present took turns supporting him through this investigation and presentation of techniques for a further 30 minuets of surreal barn-dancing…………….. if only you could get this in Redz seven nights a week.

A special mention must be made of the vocal talents of two heavily intoxicated eastern european (they never quite managed to explain exactly where they were from!) who entered the fray at various points. People may say that you could never perform something like Zappa’s “Lumpy Gravy” live—well given the right balance of whatever they were on, they may decide to stage it yet….. if you don’t believe me (and that’s probably the best stance to take) listen—puny earthling—to the evidence……………………………………..