6     Mechanical forest 2.0

Entering the forest

How does one start a new project? If people only knew how much work it is to put together one hour of new music. I need an idea, I need funding, I need a venue, I need an ensemble who understands the idea, I need a visual concept and I need a work method to achieve all the above.  

I started working with this project in December 2021. Norway was in a new lockdown due to the pandemic at the moment, and I didn’t know what the winter would bring. All I knew is that on the May 10^th I would (hopefully) be on stage with The Mechanical Forest 2.0 at the Maijazz Festival 2022.

Ritual

In music the use of theatrical devices can enhance performance. They are also linked to ritual practices, a powerful idea that has been, and still is, applied to compositional works. (Marinho 2010)

Going to a great rock concert can be incredibly unifying. Most (hopefully) people in the audience know and like the band/artist, so even before the music starts, there is a sense of community in the air. The stage is usually elevated, so that we, the audience (or maybe I should say the congregation?) can look up at our heroes. 

Some artists have taken the idea of the ritual further, using theatrical elements such as performing a black mass on stage (Mayhem, Brutal Assault tour 2017), or just the fact that every time you watch Alice Cooper live, you know that he will be killed on stage sometime during the show (by guillotine, hanging or the electric chair. I'll come back to Alice Cooper later in my reflection).

The anticipation is unifying for the audience, but can also be empowering for the performer as it gives the performance a strong identity. The ritual in this planned performance doesn’t necessarily have to be as radical as those of Alice Cooper, but I do find the idea inspiring, and it can be used as a creative tool.  

Mystery 

I love going into another world, and I love mysteries. So I don’t really like to know very much ahead of time. I like the feeling of discovery. I think that’s one of the great things about a continuing story: that you can go in, and go deeper and deeper and deeper. You begin to feel the mystery, and things start coming. (Lynch, D. 2006)

I’m intrigued by the idea of having a mystery on stage in this performance, if only a very subtle one. In the first Mechanical Forest (MF), I did present a little mystery in the beginning:

(…)You see that wall there? That…sort of…wall shaped wall? It’s not really a wall at all. Not a wall at all. (…)

Mechanical Forest (Schanche V. 2021)

This wall is something I will address in the 2.0 version of the Mecanical Forest. In the first version of the Mechanical Forest, I mostly saw the idea of a forest as being a way to describe how improvisation in music could work, an ecological system where we were all depending on each other, as well as always being aware of the fact that the whole system could collapse and that we then would have to rebuild it from scratch. 

Improvisation in the Mechanical Forest

While working towards the new version, I have been drawn more to what the relationship we as humans actually have with the forest. Being a Norwegian, my idea of a forest is a mixture of memories of my childhood and old Norwegian Folklore, as well as fake memories made by movies like «The Blair Witch Project». The forest is something that can be beautiful and calming in daytime, and then scary in the dark. 

I was still reluctant to the idea of composing a lot of music for this project. I wanted to see if it was possible for me and my fellow musicians to be able to improvise within the artistic idea I had. I wanted to tell a story of three people who were lost in the woods, living in limbo. 

This was inspired by an experience I had a year prior to this concert,  I had a short experience of light panic while being lost in the woods near our summer house in the north of Norway for an hour. While being a bit scary, it was also liberating in some ways. And the feeling of finally getting back on the trail gave me a deep satisfaction. Getting lost made a short hike into a more existential experience. I had a feeling of being lost in time and could almost feel the presence of my ancestors, who had been walking in those woods for well over a 1000 years. Us Norwegians still have a cultural bond with the forest, but as modern man has to travel further and further to actually get to a forest, we don’t have the same relationship anymore. The forest is more of a memory, something we watch on TV instead of actually spend time there in real life. 

I was aiming to make myself to be able to create sounds, emotions, energy, and storytelling that were needed for this project to work. If I needed something to sound scary or sad, I had to be able to sound scary with my guitar, and even to be able to show it physically. I had to be able to feel all these things to be able to play it. 

By this, I mean that I had to go deep inside myself and let these feelings come to me. This was a hard process, as it sometimes stirred up bad memories. During this process, I often left my rehearsal studio exhausted and sad after a days work, but I also believe that by doing this, I found a deeper connection with my instrument. 

Musicians in the Mechanical Forest 2.0

Eva Bjerga Haugen was in the first Mechanical Forest, and we have worked on several projects in the past. 

How do I bring in a new person into this world? I wanted to involve saxophonist Kristoffer Alberts in the project as I felt I needed a strong, improvising voice. He has a long list of projects and collaborations that I find very interesting. Besides his work with the band Cortex, he has (among many other things) released an album with the guitarist Nels Cline and the project Exoterm, and the album Exit Into The Corridor (2019 Hubro) .

Making an ensemble means trying to find people who are right for that specific project. Sometimes you need musicians with a lot of personality and a strong voice, sometimes you need someone you have to instruct in a more detailed way. And then of course, there is that small detail of what instrument they play. 

The Time Traveller 

I’m a time traveller. When I create new music and plan ways to perform it live, I travel in time. The concept of being a time traveller started to dawn on me when I started creating videos for The Mechanical Forest, as I have already mentioned earlier in this reflection. It became even more clear to me while instructing Kristoffer Alberts on how to play and behave while filming him for a video to be used in Mechanical Forest 2. We talked about the fact that he had to play and behave in a different way than he would find natural in a solo performance. He would have to play in a matter that would sound and look good in the Max patch, meaning that we needed long notes and big gestures. He would have to go against his intuition of playing an interesting, well-structured solo improvisation. He would also have to leave the concept of thinking about his performance as a linear piece with a start and an ending. When I play the videos on stage, I jump in the timeline, and there is no sense of a beginning or end. I also found that the parts in the videos where there is silence are incredibly important. Because of the natural background noise on the recordings, there will still be an audio signal being processed by the granular loop, giving it a, in lack of a better word, «Lynchian»^⁠1 sound. This meant that he also had to leave gaps in his performance, and instead of creating sound, I instructed him to gestures that would create interesting images in the video granular loop. This way, I try to create the instrument that I want the videos to be. 

The Quartercaster

The guitar in this picture is my Telecaster which I bought when I got the gig as a hired gun with the Norwegian Pop star Morten Abel in 2011. Abel is very well-known in Norway, with a career that spans 40 years. When I started in his band, I was mostly playing improvised music and my guitar rig was built around that type of music ⁽¹⁾. I figured that I had to get a «pop guitar», and the Tele seemed to be good tool for the type of music we were playing in that show. It looked cool, it was good for strumming and it sounded a bit dirty. Although I liked being a part of the whole «playing with a pop star» situation, it did feel a bit alien to me. I liked the music, I used to listen to it a lot when I was younger, but I always knew that to many people, I was that «jazz guy", simply because I had a jazz education. Even though my background was from rock, and I use a lot of rock aesthetic in my music, a jazz education tends to colour peoples impression of you. 

I have a couple of stickers on the guitar from the English comedy show “The Mighty Boosh”. One of the characters from that show described himself as “the fastest guitarist in Leeds”.  He also came with another great quote: «You fear jazz, you fear the lack of rules”, and those two stickers were my own inside joke as well as a reminder of who I was. I was a guitarist who had spent a lot of time searching for new sounds in the guitar instead of learning hundreds of tunes.

The Telecaster was eventually replaced, and it didn’t really use it much until I got the idea of making it into a quartertone guitar. In other words, the guitar I bought as a direct consequence of being hired to play with a big pop artist is the guitar I choose to rebuild so that it can never be used for that purpose again. At the time, I didn’t really reflect much over that decision. It wasn’t before I one day stumbled over the picture above that I remembered the history of that guitar. Technically, The Quartercaster (I had to give it a name) is a Telecaster Guitar with extra frets, making it a quartertone guitar. 

I worked with Spectral Music early in my PhD project, as well as being inspired by Norwegian guitarist and composer Bjørn Fongaard’s (1919-1980) quartertone guitar. Twice, the Telecaster has had the job of bringing me into music that was new to me. 

When I had it made, I was intrigued by the possibilities of creating new sounds. After having worked with it for a while, I realised that I could not justify the amount of time I would have to spend practising it to fully master the instrument. If I were to use it in a project, I had to have a clear idea of the role it would play. 

Reflections after using the Quartercaster in Mechanical Forest 2.0 

I have a lot of recurring dreams. One of them started about 15 years ago, and although it only comes a couple of times each year, the experience is so strong that I often think about it. This is the dream:

I’m in a concert hall, it looks very much like the one in Stavanger Konserthus, called Fartein Valen, home to the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. I’m dressed in White tie, which is the first sign that something is a bit off. I don’t own a White tie. The whole symphony orchestra is seated on stage. I’m waiting outside on stage right. The concert hall is packed with people. I hear cheering, that’s my cue. I walk on stage, towards a Steinway Grand Piano. I sit down in front of it, giving a nod to the conductor. The orchestra starts playing something familiar…it’s Rachmaninov’s third piano concerto in E minor. I play the melody, it sounds fine. But just as the main theme is over and we are about to embark on the first of many extremely difficult passages, I realise that…I don’t really play the piano! I don’t know how to play this music. I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe…I might be able to improvise myself out of this situation. But for some reason, all I can play are blues licks, and it all starts to fall apart. Then I wake up…

The feeling of being on stage with an instrument I don’t really master, is a strange one, and a scary one. And this is the feeling I had when using the Quartercaster on stage in Mechanical Forest 2.0. At that point, I had decided not to improvise with the guitar, apart from a section where I was creating timbre using effects instead of tonality. I also decided to sit while playing it, and I even placed sheet music on the floor in front of me. I knew that I had to practise the Quartercaster a lot more, as well as actually trying to define what type of instrument it is, before I was comfortable with improvising with it as I would with any other guitar. 

What is the Quartercaster? 

I started practising more on the Quartercaster, both technique and improvising. I eventually started to notice a shift in the way I approached the instrument. After having improvised (on my own) using different modes (created by spectral analysis), I started to recognise the sounds I was looking for in the guitar. There is a particular timbre that sounds similar to that of a church bell being struck, after the fundamental frequency has played out. These sounds, as well as certain intervals are sounds, I can’t create using a conventional guitar. Instead of comparing it to a normal guitar, I must search for sounds, and not expect it to feel as natural in my hand as my Goldtop does. The Quartermaster changes my whole body memory and spatio-motor orientation, as well as my pose. Even if I play it standing up, it still forms my whole body. This is something I can use, the Quartercaster makes me more vulnerable on stage, and from a scenic perspective, that makes it a helpful element.

The composing, video making, acting, instrument creating, sound design making, video controlling, artistic director, set designer-guitarist?

I realised I have to adjust the project while preparing for the next and last instalment which would be my final artistic result in my research project. As I have previously talked about in my reflection, I was inspired by some of the ideas of The New Discipline by Jennifer Walshe. I liked the idea of being able to create productions where the composer tries to create a piece involving several elements such as video, lighting and acting, on a rather small budget. This DIY mentality is something I can relate to, coming from a band culture where the money was scarce, while the ambitions were high. This meant that we had to acquire new skills, such as building stage lights, taking band photos, creating posters, learning how to operate a PA system etc.