It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.
From Fred Frith
There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert.
You could say that everything the musicians have learned and known over the years, all of their technical resources, are in a dialogue with the things they are discovering every time, as if it was the first time.
We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.
We played some gigs in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and it was the first time I really felt the group was really a band in the sense of something I could write for.
We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.
There are always things to examine. What's great is not feeling that I have to refuse any of them. Maybe no good from a PR perspective, but from the point of view of everyday life, it keeps things interesting.
The totality of a record is usually beyond ones ability to imagine when you start working on it, but the component parts are, usually, fairly clear one way or another.
Some things don't wind up sounding like you'd expect, which is just as well.
One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing was taking raw sound from locations during the film, like the candy machine, and writing pieces of music to go with them, which is totally unnecessary within the context of the film, because they have their own logic.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives