Here is an avantgarde piece from a live performance from Sunday evening (late link, sorry!). We played a group improvisation in the Concert Church in Copenhagen! The clip is about 4 minutes from the beginning. Here is the full performance if you wanna listen and read more about it:
In short, the band was playing specific instructions, where you pick a random sound described poetically or concretely from a list, then you must focus on a part of your body and look at a point in the room and play only listening to yourself. Once you notice that you lose focus on all those things, you are meant to stop playing and repeat the process, choosing a new sound. The end result is a composition akin to field recordings, where the narrative is created in the listener's mind rather than by the composer or the musicians themselves, and it creates the effect that people seem to play together or against each other at times, often by pure coincidence. We did a workshop and then the concert.
‹ My week
This week I was playing guitar at the Copenhagen Songwriter Festival 2024, starting with some open mics and culminating with a 30 minute concert with all (most of) my guitar pieces on Thursday. I also participated in a couple of songwriting workshops and feedback sessions, but no compositions came out of those, only very sparse things like a chord progression and some ideas and insights. But I met some amazing musicians, one of which I recommend yall check out, she is called Ynana Rose. She plays authentic americana folk from the forests of California, and it was such a joy to hear.
I also jammed with a couple of friends on Saturday, trying to play music from my new album but realizing I need to arrange it for a band, as it doesn't really work otherwise because the compositions are not so easy to explain because... well they're not all really full compositions, but more vibes. And I knew that, but now finally it really hits me what I wanna do for future albums. And it's gonna be interesting to delve into this process for the current album, where I'll try to dissect the songs and come up with a version of it that would work for a live show. It's not super clear yet, but for future albums I know now how important it is to have a streamlined concept, and not just for the album listening experience, but considering how this will affect live performances of the album. It doesn't mean it has to be all songs and compositions, it is ok to have semi improvised or fully improvised things, but having a well defined frame I think is key for me now, because I can see how important it is for communicating the idea to both audiences and the other musicians when you wanna play it. And then again, even for myself - since I'm doing so much random shit, I will definitely forget what some of it was meant to be, so it will be good to be more organized and thoughtful about what the pieces are about.
But that being said, I talked to Ignacio, the composer of this FOCUS piece, and asked him how he approaches playing music from an album, when the album is either songs, or semi-improvised pieces like I have, or even fully improvised as it sometimes happens. And he kinda confirmed what I was thinking too, to try and transcribe/reverse engineer the tracks to understand what's nice about them, what's the core thing I want to communicate, and then play that - and it really doesn't have to be the same thing as the album, because at the end of the day a concert is gonna be different no matter what. Sometimes he plays live completely different stuff from the album, even on entirely different instruments, and it's still kind of an album tour regardless. So that is very reassuring, and a great insight for what to do next. My album will now come out on streaming, one song per week on Fridays, and I'll get a band together to play *something* that captures the vibe of the album, even tho it's not gonna be exactly the tracks or whatever. Super exciting process.
It was a wonderful week full of music and good people. Thanks for reading and hope this was interesting to you!
