This is how we build a bridge.
Dear friends and compatriots,
There are two things coming up that I am happy to announce to you all. I also, perhaps unsurprisingly, have thoughts about them, which I will set down here as well.
First, the details:
Tuesday, Aug 29, 8pm
This is how we build a bridge
with Brady Lenzen, JC Sanford, Andy Flory
Kracum Hall @ Weitz Center for Creativity
Northfield, MN
(Loud)
Friday, September 8, 7pm
As music overheard, as image made light
Raisbeck Performance Hall @ Cornish College of the Arts
Seattle, WA
Now, the thoughts:
The first event is the capstone performance for a SEMAC grant, one that I wrote in order to bring musicians together from very different genres, performance practices, and aesthetics. Originally the idea was to meet, and play, and record, at first, then draw out of those sessions some materials I could use to build a graphic and prose score. What wound up happening was very different, though; Brady (bass) and I (drums) started to develop a vocabulary that didn’t so much care about what I wrote down on the page, or how I talked about it. That became a low-end-plus-rhythm core, sometimes angular and frenetic, sometimes driving and steady, over which JC (trombone) and Andy (electric guitar) found clever ways to sound like a million people, and also a psychedelic ocean, and angels, and digital banshees. Also, I can’t really do it without hitting hard, so I have devised ways to absorb that impact without blowing out everyone’s ears. And yet it is loud, so there is that. Be advised, please and thank you.
The second event, which I think I am going to preview at the first event, too, as a top-secret surprise (boo!), involves a different sort of thing entirely. For a long time I have wanted to create a sympathetic ear in a software instrument, a system that would encourage me to play and sing intentionally and with care. I also hoped it would support and reward that effort, in both sound and vision, as well as the efforts of listeners more generally. So I made a thing, in which vocal and keyboard improvisations drive software designed to analyze, filter, sample, and re-articulate them, then recombine and manipulate simple short videos of acrylic-painted color blocks. My 9-year-old watched it for 15 minutes and then said “DAD, this is ART.” He suffers no fools, so I think there is something to it?
In both of these cases, I notice big ideas—making an alternative notation to bring together noncongruent musical worlds, building a digital improviser to support a vocalise and finally figuring out the piano—colliding with Actual Reality, in ways that seem to do a disservice to the original goals, or ambitions, or inspirations. But I wanted to note that re-writing this story has been galvanizing my efforts lately. Away from narratives of failure, coming up short, or the General Whoopsie, and towards a confidence in process. Which brought me to: grand notions crash into modest abilities; technique is bringing these things closer together.
But lately I don’t really believe even that. Maybe this impulse to optimize is itself an obstacle. What if the grandest gesture is necessary to get everything moving, but never really means to come into being? What if the rubber meets the road in ways that don’t violate the grand gesture but, rather, honor it, by harnessing the energy of grandeur and letting it buzz along and flop around for awhile? In the end, one just lands where one lands.
If that itself is understood to be the process, then what happens was meant to. Bring everyone together for the sake of some musical explosion of epic proportions and then, in the end, just play for 45 minutes with friends. Design a robot to encourage you to play the piano every day and really learn to sing and then, in the end, just improvise a little and let the software fill the room with sound and blocks of color. Start a strange newsletter in which words figure prominently in order to go viral and sell albums and books and then, in the end, just carve out a little space where you can say a few things, that you did not even know you thought until you said them.
I appreciate your reading, and I would love to maybe see you at either of these things!
La la la,
A