Free improvised music allows me as a musician to be able to change direction at any time. Free improvised music is the only form of music where I can completely change my way of playing depending on the character of the room or the space. The room becomes a co-player that I can either go along with or resist.
I must be able to express one thing and then take a break. I must be able to take the impression of something and then take a break again. Very suddenly. And reflect on what really happened. Just before and just after I expressed something. From a sounding monads to another. And between.
I deal with thoughts regarding discovering or retrieving “silence” in between two events, words, rhythms, or notes. An empty space, which is not a void, but space filled with expectations. Where there is trust to be able to wait, hesitate, delay and listen, as well as reliance on silence as a field of force of its own.
In a poetic context, it is not controversial to state that the way a line of verse creates meaning occurs in between, and accordingly because of, the two pauses, silences, spaces, that surround it, which make it emerge as a specific unit in time and space. The central question examined in my work is how the caesura/line break, which is written into the versified poem as a silent event in time, is affected when integrated in an improvised sounding course of events. And also how a musical, to a great extent improvised, flow of time transforms when integrated with verbal poetic material. In In the Midst of a Sounding Creation – To Compose in Real Time, I illuminate the ever-present questions regarding the conception of time, and the now and the then in the creating process. We are on our way away from something, toward something else, where something extremely crucial happens at precisely that very instant that just was. The method is constantly present – also when we make a presentation through the work, when we explore the mediation as a shaping part of the artistic process.
So...
The research method I apply is strongly integrated with the act of doing – here and now: In what I play. In what I sing and recite. In what I draw and film. In real time. The method is constantly present – also when I make a presentation through my work, when I explore the mediation as a shaping part of the artistic process. What happens to my artistic expression when it takes on the form of a dramatized research performance? Do I find something of value or do I just create dead ends in my practice? Do I dare to carry out these lines of thought all the way, and actually articulate a new, characteristic way of expression? The field I find myself in is the subjective doing, in music, image, and text. The doing forms new meanings when I, seamlessly searching, move through these three different expressions of art. With my research method I want to avoid positioning myself in a field characterized by predetermined points of reference. I have chosen not to make a distinction between improvisation and composition, but regard them as two, inter-dependent, sides in the seamless searching. It is precisely on the way through music, image and text something becomes visible to me. The method allows me to be and act in a context new to me: A research field to play in. On. In front of. Behind. The research method is a process that results in the work On the inside of silence. This is the kind of research I want to develop together with other artists and art forms, where the artist's individual process is central. Here and now.
Moving along is the process of proceeding through the session at the local level. This process finds its way as it proceeds. Its path is not known in advance. It consists of the relational moves and present moments that strung together make up the session. It is characterized by attempts to achieve a greater and more coherent intersubjective field. This, however, involves much unpredictability about what will happen next because the process is extremely inexact, nonlinear, and sloppy. Because of the nature of the process, it gives rise to many emerging properties, such as now moments and moments of meeting.[1]
....
[1] Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, W.W. Norton & Company, 2004, pp. 244-245.
Sten Sandell