I've been digging through a
long-ignored tape cassette collection with which I have moved house around a
dozen times in fifteen years and yet haven't listened to since before around
2000.
Remembering the essential
octagonal bic biro, for pulling up slack, to prevent the whole thing being
chewed in the doggy jaws of an old tape player.
I'm trying to compile a
story from unearthed bits and pieces I composed or recorded or wrote a long
time ago.
The story is this:
why the ‘bebop-romanticism-klezmer-highlife-cinta-baroque’ hybridity that I tried first to transcribe then to convey to academy-trained musicians, for them to play on a stage in front of an audience of at most a hundred expectant classical-canon conformists
turned into
simulating impossible,
acoustic, performance with early commercial digitalia
then into
collecting sounds on the
street and recompiling the street inside an enclosed space, with glimpses of
the original hybrid crowd's voices
then
finding ways to walk inside
it so it's always different, unrepeatable.
I’m still working on
telling that story through some peculiar digital sound objects and rambling,
utterly inappropriate words.
<.~<.~<.~ <.~<.~<.~
HTTP://BASIC.FM ~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>
<.~<.~<.~ Watch
this space for my first radio broadcast ~.>~.>~.>
<.~<.~<.~ on
augmented reality and music composition ~.>~.>~.>
<.~<.~<.~ <.~<.~<.~
S e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 3 ~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>~.>
Meanwhile, I discovered
some striking archaeological evidence of the 'shift', the evolution out of
learning to play the standard repertoire in a regional orchestra, through
keeping up with incredible street bands in Belgrade, Budapest and Paris, and
capturing live events for the bubbles to build fleeting dreamscapes in sound.
A major influence on my
shift away from notes on paper for people, toward the construction of musical
junk-sculpture, was the improvising pianist John Law.
Nearly twenty years ago, I
went into a large echoey room with a Steinway, intending to record my Piano
Sonata.
A master of digression and
procrastination, even then, I instead recorded this.
Exhibit A: “In Walked John
Law”, solo piano improvisation, September 1994
