Reflections, January 2020
I think KA is a fragmentation tool: it fragments the input. It’s in the nature of the program: recording and playing back parts of the recorded material.
The different personalities provide different ways of fragmentation.
I would also describe my innenklavier (inside piano) playing as fragmented. It’s not part of my language to play long melodic or rhythmic arcs.*
Playing with KA means that my fragmented playing gets fragmented again, like a sort of a “fragmentation mirror”. So, KA does not add any new meaning to my playing.
During our last meeting in September I was fascinated and got inspired by Morten’s way of using KA’s output as part of a song structure. **
I tried to play more self-contained material on the innenklavier, but it didn’t work. (My instrument in itself is already a fragment – a part of a piano).
Then I tried to include some real piano playing: I connected several of my pick-ups to my upright piano and combined it with my mixer internal feedbacks. A series of pressed keys seemed to me already more coherent and less fragmented than my inside piano material.
Then I played in three steps:
– Playing distorted upright piano + KA
– Playing inside piano + KA (playing back upright piano + live-inside piano)
– KA without me (like an installation with the recorded material of upright piano and inside piano)
At the moment I think this works better than all the settings I tried before. Or at least it’s more fun.
Coming back to Morten’s comments on his last concert at the museum (found here): it gives me the possibility to step out, to let KA digest and to come out with some configurations of (or interactions between) piano + inside piano material (that can be understood as comments on each other) that I wouldn’t be able to play.
At the same time, I steal myself away from the direct interaction with KA in this approach.
I provide material for KA and let it mix, layer, connect it with each other; KA becomes a tool that brings my various inputs into an (live mixed) installative form. Here KA is released from the role of co-improviser and is transformed into an installation tool. A prerequisite for this is that the input materials of KA must relate to each other in an interesting way. The various musical materials illuminate and comment on each other, so that something third emerges that goes beyond the individual sounds fed in.
KA taught me to accept actions of fellow musicians that I don't understand, didn't expect and don't like, and to watch my upcoming anger about them with interest.
KA has taught me that my improvisational skills, e.g. reacting quickly and intuitively, suddenly and surprisingly changing material or changing the direction taken in its context can be very exhausting.
It is not amazed, does not let itself be irritated or surprised, is not happy.
I jump around like a rabbit, strike hooks, and give myself away - without any meaning
KA's fragmented style of playing has forced me to learn to play longer musical bows that follow their own musical logic regardless of what else happens.
KA taught me to follow a paradoxical/multi-track strategy when improvising with it: To follow one's own path unperturbed, not to react to what it brings in; at the same time to be open for the special moment when something comes from it, from which I let myself be 100% influenced.
KA showed me that my sounds are not interesting within an improvisation as such (as fixed entities, recorded and played back). They become interesting when they are „alive", when they can transform themselves in a modulating way, dependent or independent of the surrounded context.
KA showed me that imitating it (play without desire, idea, goal) makes me unhappy.
Besides: If I get involved in its "reckless" playing attitude and I play similarly, an inflation of recklessness is created. It becomes an idiom, the normal, and then loses the essence of ruthlessness.
KA's paradoxical nature: it sounds like me (its sound manifesting, as it records me and plays me back), but does not function like me at all, because it acts (out of the logic of a program) from completely different motives.
Another consideration for improvisation between people:
Is it possible that we make music together, which we have been working on for a long time, and analyze its sound, structure, interaction, timing, expression, so that it succeeds,
with which we are often dissatisfied (there is always a search at some point and something is not brought to the point...) and sometimes satisfied,
that we are looking for something in or underneath it that has not so much to do with sound.
That it is about a meeting that lies beneath words and also beneath sounds.
That a machine does not get lost there, or if it does, that I have not yet met it there.
What else I have learned
That a group of musicians who do not play together, but exchange ideas about playing with a computer, can get very close and get to know each other in a very different way than when making music.
We looked into KA like into a mirror and all saw something:
- Fearlessness, loneliness, freedom
- form, coldness, openness,
- the end of the hierarchy
- an environment
- your own preferences
- the own limits
- the absence of inspiration
- the attachment to one's own originality / identity
- the detachment from one's own originality/identity
- dancing with the uncontrollable
- the disappointment about the controllable
- the impossibility of taking the non-human seriously in music
- the desire to control, manipulate, design
- the desire to give up control
- the interest in discomfort
Reflection text #2, Feb 2019
Reflections on playing with K.A.
Workshop November 2018
Reflections after the first time I listened to it:
This piece doesn’t work.
At least four different sorts of sound material are occurring unrelated to each other and reveal neither a clear atmosphere nor a clear structure:
Quiet and lyrical material (rubbing a bamboo stick that is plugged between two strings) loud and energetic percussive sounds in the grand piano (KA)
harsh electronic sounds from my mixer
an often repeated melodic/rhythmical motive from KA (archive from Morten)...
Read the full text and watch videos here
(*I do play sometimes in a “landscape” style with long textures and sounds that mix and melt and create an atmosphere. Feeding KA with this material and getting back fragmented parts of it on top of my sound layers do sound ok. At the same time, it sounds very predictable and not like a step into an aesthetically new territory.)
**The same quality was present in the workshop with Anna Lindal in Stockholm in February, when she played Bach and KA played back fragments of Bach, or in some cases slightly altered the pitch. One still recognized Bach and it was fun to notice KA's form of deviation and the differences to the yet known.
I also find this quality in the interaction of the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble and KA (found on this page).
The music of the ensemble is rhythmically and harmonically organized and repetitive.
KA functions as a defragmenter, distorter and shadow of the material and the very clear structures of the ensemble. KA adds another, very clearly defined dimension to the ensemble’s music.
Recordings with KA in August 2020
Recording 1
In the first two minutes, KA mixes the material that I previously fed him with. There are encounters of different, not necessarily conceived materials that I could never play in this way. There is a strange motif (descending mixer feedback tone sequence) that comes up again and again and that puts a characteristic stamp on the piece.
After two minutes, I play along with it live - another level arises that mixes well with what's already there, but also adds something new to it.
KA plays the old materials, picks up the new ones and plays them back partially looped and shredded, which I am referring to with the live playing. That makes everything a lot more complex.
Interestingly, everything connects more and more to a dense, rather gloomy, sometimes rhythmic atmosphere - until the recording stops because the zoom memory was full.
Recording 2
Live I play a deep, slow groove with a bright, quiet drone in the background.
KA plays very distorted, soundless interjections every now and then - together it results are coordinated in a very gloomy, very smooth image.
Recording 3
The basis here was the idea of an acoustic image, a processless state, fed from single events played live by me and returned by KA. KA becomes a composition tool, which helps to slightly change single events on the inside piano, sometimes layer them on top of each other and throw them into the room at random.
From min. 16 KA plays alone.
In my opinion, KA's part is coherent in all examples; one can listen to his part without my part and gets the impression that a musical idea is being pursued or a relatively clear atmosphere is created. The interaction between KA and me is neither reactive nor "parallel". A common space is shared, in which both voices move in their own way. There is mutual influence: in my live playing I sometimes refer loosely to colours, moods, events of KA's voice.
These references are taken up by it and played back again, sometimes slightly altered. This results in slow transformations in the course of some of the recordings.
Interestingly, the roles change between the leading voice and the voice that "follows": In recording 1 and 4 KA is leading, in 2 and 3 (apparently) me.
In the course of the project, I developed a strategy to develop my own voice, which is more or less coherent and not dependent on the other one.
It seems that KA - through the different stages it went through in the project process - has also gotten there.
SUMMARY, September 2020
What has the project brought me?
When I notice that my shoelaces are open I dare to interrupt while playing with a person and tie it.
Reflection text #1, 2018
Improvising with humans and improvising with machines
Reflections seven months into the project
I like to communicate through music, to negotiate different ideas and different aesthetic preferences among musicians – the friction that occurs and how to deal with it.
I like the challenge to be aware of my own wishes and to be able to follow them as much as being aware of what others do. I like the closeness that emerges by playing music together that is completely different from closeness created by talking. The very unique encounter with the personalities of musicians that might not be apparent outside of the music.
(…)
In human encounters there are always expectations and projections and even feedbacks of projections. I can project into Kim-Auto but I will project into emptiness and it won’t project anything back. I will be confronted with my own projections. Playing with Kim-Auto might be like being reflected by a mirror. Or it suggests that you interact with the emptiness (where you send your projections) as it was your partner (…) Sometimes (…) I get scared and ask myself if I really want a machine being as human-like as possible.
Recording 4
KA plays its own "theme", quite coherent, almost melodically developed from previous elements played with the inside piano. Live I play contrapuntally, short interjections that become longer and longer and develop a character of their own that has nothing to do with KA's theme ("parallel playing") - both together develop a strange atmosphere, which together eventually becomes a very experimental "song".
