Taking a short break from The Big Hustle, and all the extra-curricular activities that surround music (to borrow an expression from CT), to do this short improvisation. Enjoy the noise!
Thinking in-the-box (I almost called this one ‘Four-By-Four’). A little something that I walked away with from my last performance. Not quite as… lyrical or inventive, I think, as what transpired at the gig, but it is a one-take. And a hat-tip to Richard Scott for mentioning EP last week.
At Friday’s solo set I found myself in spaces I had not occupied in a while—some techniques I hadn’t really leaned into in years. I wondered, without prep, if I could make something from these. Enjoy!
A quick’n’dirty improvisation—just something to try out a simplified recording and mixing setup. I have no idea if this one is any good. It’s what it is. (At least, as promised, it’s a first-take improvisation.)
As always, please hit me in the comments with any questions… although, as I went into this one with no plan, I’m not sure how helpful my answers might be. Regardless, thanks so, so much for listening!
A short, improvisative meditation on snaps and grids (or should that be unsnaps and degrids?). Simple, modest—nothing at all complicated—but it does exactly what I set out to do.
I love what’s recorded (and sculpted) here as sound. There are behind-the-scenes stories about an impossible group emerging from the debris of lockdown and the tangles of inter-border bureaucracy (stories for another time). But also, to my ears as a listener, there’s something tricky and oblique about our music—an origami of fire music and improvisative mischief—knotted, folded-on-itself, and, at time, joyously vexed.
Yet, the feeling on-stage, it’s all near effortless ‘and then’s and ‘therefore’s; of effects and reactions, but also reframings and reflections and retroactions. We went, I think, to a lot of unexpected places in that one session.
So sit-back in your favorite sofa or beanbag, or, headphones ready, go for a wander and a walk, or maybe sit at the table with a good book, and enjoy the journey. [Read the rest…]
I’m very, very happy with the music on this album, and feel very privileged to have shared this journey with the creative people on-stage, and behind-the-scenes. Please enjoy the noise!
Catch a track (‘Autopoiesis VI’) from Gonggong 225088! The extended preview will premiere at 5pm CEST* on Thursday, May 23, 2024! [Click ‘notify me’…]
By turns light-as-a-feather, and heavy and prickly as a bucket of rusty nails, the music is of contradiction and ambiguity. Leaps into ’90s HatHut pastiche are followed by truckers-in-space-engine-rumbles; slow-crawls-from-the-swap of irony-free ‘bells’n’smells’ sound art followed by turns-turns-turns-on-a-dime mutant Free Funk. [More…]
Click ‘notify me’, and be ready with your headphones (and popcorn), and join me on Thursday for some origami fire music!
* 17:00 CEST, 15:00 UTC, 11:00 EST, and 8:00 PST. (Or: 12am in Seoul, 6pm in Athens, 12pm in Buenos Aires, and 5pm in Berlin.).
Track listing: Autopoiesis I (≥ 10:14), Autopoiesis II (≥ 4:29), Niche Shift I (16:09), Niche Shift II (≥ 4:45), Niche Shift III (4:35), Niche Shift IV (≥ 12:52), Autopoiesis III (3:26), Autopoiesis IV (≥ 5:03), Autopoiesis V (≥ 3:17), Autopoiesis VI (3:37). Total duration ≥ 70:14.
The Zen of Frustration, or: ever had one of those days (or weeks)? This is probably as spontaneous as it gets. I felt better* by the end, but, I don’t know, as a listener, does this bring you frustration or relief?
* Autocorrect suggested ‘battered.’ Nice try, but no cigar.
My latest study in the #onetakestudy series is a super simple, quick little improvisation. This one is partly a response to some of the issues I had with study Nº 6. This study does, I think, what it needs to do, and no more. Enjoy.
I came away from a session with Kaffe Matthews with some fragments of ideas—not themes, barely motives—let’s call them random arrangement of atoms. This study is an unprepared (without even a warm-up) first-run of some of these. Think of it as a soup made from whatever’s at hand.
I’ve taken the title for this latest study (‘Don’t Overthink It’) from an album by Corey Mwamba. (I hope you don’t mind, Corey.)
