The first two things we looked at were: 

• Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, which are a series of random statements, phrases or suggestions that you pick at random and apply to what you're doing.  

• John Zorn's Cobra composition, which is a load of instructions for performance, but doesn't tell anyone what notes to play. 

Brian Eno is the guy who invented ambient music, and then made records with U2 and James and did a great job on Paul Simon's last album. John Zorn is, from what I've seen on YouTube, an insane sax player. So neither of their ideas seemed best adapted to what we want to do. 

So we were talking about it, and realised that what we needed were frameworks to improvise with, and Drum Monkey decided they should be called 'Fluid Frameworks', which is a great name :))) 

Inspired by Drum Monkey's awesome collection of weird improvised stuff for me to listen to, I've been sorting out a Spotify playlist. It took me a little while to work out how to do it, just because it's easier than you'd think. It's just like iTunes - search for the songs ---> drag them into a playlist ---> copy the internet address of the list ---> away you go! It's amazing :))) 

Anyway, here's my 'Inspiration List' - not much of it is improvised, as until about three weeks ago, I didn't know that I loved improvised music! How stupid is that?? Anywayyyyyy, here's a list of things that sound like the music I want to improvise. Some are floaty, some are rhythmic, some blend music from around the world. Some of it sounds like drum monkey on space-drums, and a few little bits sounds a bit like me on bass, but only because I do a bad impersonation of some of my heroes. 

If you haven't, here's the list of songs - 

This band - Verfremdungseffekt - is much more interesting. It's also a little bit weird, and a challenge to explain. But I'll try, just for you. Seeing as how you asked so nicely. 

The name - that's from Brecht. As in Berthold Brecht, the playwright. He had this thing he called 'The Distancing Effect' - trying to make sure the audience stay sort of dispassionate about the theatre, as a way of them being more engaged. For us, it started as a cool name, but makes sense, because we'll never be doing flashy gigs with lights and stages - it's the wrong music, and we don't want to. We want to put it in different contexts, and take our improvised music into cool places. Our first gig was in a bookshop. Looks like our second one will be too! hehehehe. 

So that's why my twitter name is TheDistanceMeg - from the Distancing Effect. I know, it's not a great name, but all the ones I wanted were taken... 

So, we improvise, we don't record, Drum Monkey plays space drums and I loop my bass. Gem plays guitar with us when he's not playing rock stars in Japan. 

As you'll have seen in Drum Monkey's first post, he did me a lovely Spotify play list of great music to inspire me to improvise. Please make any suggestions you have have for that in the comments at the bottom :))))

Our guitarist, Gem Morris, is currently rehearsing with eNaNoTangent, before heading off to Japan for a tour. He's got a blog too, all about the tour - see http://gemjapan.posterous.com/ for more on that! 

cheers, Drum Monkey