Un-predictable trees
Reflections on playing with K.A.
Workshop November 2018
In the kind of improvisation that I’m engaged in, it is not customary to talk about form before playing. At least, in my experience it is not. It doesn’t mean that form is not important, it means it can only be seen in retrospect. Form is tracked in memory and can be seen in retrospect. Planning form and certain developments in the music before it is played, often come in conflict with the process of improvising.[1] The kind of improvising I’m engaged in is a bit like seeding, you can’t tell in advance exactly how the tree will look. If you know your seeds, you can probably tell the general growing direction, general information such as tall or short, green or red leaves, but you can’t tell the exact shape. You can see how it has become, not how will become.
Often, I find that forms in improvised music are predictable. Either they are predictable by their unpredictability – anything can happen, so everything happens, whenever. Or it is predictable because it is restless and fast – again, anything can happen, so everything happens, whenever. Or it is predictable because it is slow – anything can happen, but very little happens, and it happens very slow. I assume that many listeners to contemporary improvised music easily could fit listening experiences into these categories. Allow me to generalize even more for a while: it shouldn’t be too hard to fit any old-school British improvising group, any free jazz group, music from the late nineties Berlin-school or the so-called London new silence into these categories. Currently I’m stuck up in the latter category – the slow one. When I say currently I mean for the last 15 years or so… Slow currentness.
Obviously, predictability in form isn’t really a problem. Sonatas are also predictable. What matters is of course how the composer operate his or her ideas within a specific form or how the elements are organised. And perhaps it is so also for improvisation. However, improvisation is supposed to be the art of now, so you kind of expect to be surprised in the now.
During many of my different playing experiences with KimAuto in 2018, I found that several of the improvisations developed quite similarly. I find the form itself to be quite interesting – even if it has already become predictable. I am not completely sure if this form is entirely dictated by KimAuto (most likely not), or if it more a result of how I respond to KimAutos operation mode. When KimAuto is rigged with an empty archive that records what the human does and uses this as its only output, it will stay close to the current human output in the beginning, and gradually separate from this during the entire piece. A bit how a Chinese hand fan unfolds. If I, like I often do, stick to one type of material for a while, this material will be mirrored by KimAuto. Most likely KimAuto’s will continue to chew my material a little even when I change material, causing slow transitions even I change fast. And it is likely to come back to the initial material throughout the piece.
It fascinates me how improvising with KimAuto generate musical form that I can’t really see would happen naturally in an all-human improvising environment.[2] This specific form triggers new musical behaviour in me. The form allows me to both plant a seed to see how it develops, and at the same time it forces me into a mode that allows me to, for better or worse, make plans. I have noticed that when I’m playing with KimAuto I seem to have two major strategies when it comes to choosing material. I either choose material I easily can create a large contrast to (contrast in timbre, rhythm, density etc), or I chose material that I change microscopically (iterated sounds where I create small changes in volume, accentuations, pitch, meter etc). Never in between and rarely complex with lots of information and variation in timbre, pitch, rhythm and dynamics. At least, this seems to have been the situation up till now in my relationship with KimAuto.
I’m listening back to the pieces we play at Morten’s studio on our LAB in November 2018 and this specific form has almost evaporated. Most likely this is due to the higher complexity in KimAuto’s output. How my material is chewed and developed by KimAuto and how I play with this development disappears in KimAuto’s complex output. This is a natural consequence of how KimAuto was set up for this test: it was rigged with an empty archive, but much of KimAuto’s output was translated into midi-signals which triggered hammers and motors inside a grand piano, combined with a midi-piano. This formed an otherworldly semi-melodic percussion ensemble. In combination with the unfiltered and unprocessed recordings of the human players this became KimAuto’s complex output.
In this video I find that my sparse sounds can’t compete with KimAuto. In my ears it is an unbalanced playing situation. I don’t really believe in it. Or rather, I really don’t believe in it. I don’t believe in the “system”, or the ecology that comprises KimAuto and me. If my contributions had the ability for more contrasts, it could have given a more balanced output. Perhaps I would believe more in the interplay. I am not sure. But at least I did believe more in the system when I performed with a similarly complex version of KimAuto here (https://player.vimeo.com/video/285917921). It felt more right.
I think what I’m seeking and what I’m currently missing in this system (ecology) is a healthy balance between direction and freedom. A clear direction. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. It is not one specific direction, it can be many. And the direction may be a different one for each encounter. It can even change direction during each encounter. But it has to be clear. And still, such clear direction needs to give me a flexibility and freedom to move around in that system. What kind of direction is that…? The system does not have to be real, but it has to be right. Am I making sense? What happened to form? I wrote about form and now I write about a system. And about direction and flexibility. And that it has to be right. What does this have to do with form?
[1]I’m not talking about the kind of improvisation where you play over chord changes, melodies, ragas etc. Much contemporary improvisation is more a result of evolving musical ideas. Of course, the ideas and the musical material can and will very often be a result of something predetermined, but how the musical contributions from the players in a group come together, are results of processes and music that emerge.
