OK, so Drum Monkey and I have been working on some ideas for 'guided improv'. We LOVE improvising, but have been looking at a load of different ways to inspire different ideas.
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 :)))
Here are a few of the ones I've come up with - just single line inspiration ideas for us to improvise around:
• Soundtrack to oblivion
• from space drums to space bass to spacial awareness
• when shit is the new awesome
• droning on and on. In a good way.
• feminist funk
• old romantic improv - from Duran to Miles in 4 movements
I've got some others, but this is just a small sample.
Drum Monkey has got into writing a script for a non-existent film that we're then going to soundtrack. I'll leave him to blog about that. Suffice to say, it's all kinds of fun, and we'll get back to you with how it goes. Hopefully we'll try some out at the next bookshop gig.
Bye for nowwwwww,
luv Meg x