This blog has been rather neglected of late. A winter working long hours in a cold warehouse has allowed time for musicking, but little to spare for writing about it. I hope to be posting here more in the coming months. This is an update of what I have been working on lately.
In the past my music has been driven by me from start to finish, it is a very personal pursuit which has only gradually become something I share with others. Thanks largely to twitter I now have connections with many wonderful musicians and composers who I would not have met otherwise. This led to the two gigs I played at the end of last year (in Colchester and London). I am pleased to report that this year’s musical work has involved more collaboration and thinking about other people’s approaches to music and sound.
Many of my musical friends took part in the RPM2012 Challenge, to write and record an album in one month, February to be precise. I have toyed with the idea of doing this before, and may well in the future, but I don’t feel that output has really been a problem for me, and most of my releases have been done in a month or so. I don’t really feel it’s useful for me at this stage. I have, however, been involved in someone else’s.
UK-based Australian composer Caitlin Rowley issued a call for volunteers to commission and record new pieces for her RPM album. I was one of the people who stepped forward, and so was lucky enough to work with Caitlin on what became ‘I Want It To Kill People’, the seventh track of her album. It was a real pleasure to enter into another person’s approach to making a piece. She took my work with field-recordings as a starting point and created a tape part for me to play over, with a graphic score to guide my playing. This really helped focus my performance, especially as the piece is quite short and I’ve been working with longer forms lately. I’m really pleased with the result, and we hope to work together more in the future.
Meanwhile, I am working on a piece for a project for an audio-book version of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Again, this is an opportunity that came to me through the wonders of the World Wide Web. SoundFjord, a gallery specialising in sound art, issued a call for musicians and sound artists to express an interest in contributing. Those who did so have all been given some text to work with, selections will be made after they have the submissions. I hadn’t come across the book before, and have enjoyed exploring it’s dark reflections on the emptiness of everyday life in Lisbon in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties. I also view this work as a collaboration, though of a very different nature. Trying to distill the atmosphere of even one section of a complex literary work into ten minutes of sound (and sound that can be spoken over) has proved quite a challenge. I’m not quite there yet, but pretty close. I’ll hopefully have something to post in the next few days.
Thanks for reading, I will blog again soon
Sam
