Yearly Archives: 2022

Improvising freely in lockdown days

Even more dramatically this artistic contribution of the technology involved in playing-apart-together showed up, like an imposed final signature, in the unPublic tetralogy that we did using a voice rooms in the VoIP application Discord. That was in April and May of 2020, in the days that world-wide the corona pandemic had reached its first peak.

Discord originally was especially popular in gamers’ communities, as a platform for discussing tricks, trades and strategies. It was not and is not intended (nor suitable, at least not in any ‘fidelity’ sense) for music streaming.  The digital audio streams, sent and received by the participating ‘players’ in a ‘voice room’, are optimized for vocal exchange. The compression algorithms used by the software allow for no more than minimal ‘fine-tuning’.
And it is these algorithms that make Discord into an active and unpredictable—hence pretty interesting—fellow improviser. The application glitches just about everything that a player contributes from where she is performing, in real time, in front and around a laptop computer that runs Discord.
The resulting combined signal is radically different in each of the participants’ local voice rooms. Each of the different contributing locations is like a separate sonic world. We used this observed given to thus exploit numbers of different ‘cyber-projections’ of one and the same electro-acoustic improvisation. The projections are created simultaneously and exist in parallel. None of them is the true one; the sort of meta-piece behind it all remains elusive.

Improvising freely in lockdown days

The internet boom, that some thirty years ago started connecting networks of networks of digital data crunching machines, from its early days onward has inspired technologically gifted and visionary actors in the global electronic and electro-acoustic music scene to imagine ways to extend and cross-over their performance practice to the virtual. A fascinating example using the earliest available technologies for streaming audio, and again one close to my heart and personal practice, is the International Headphone Festival ‘Le Placard’, that was put on track almost twenty five years ago, in 1998, by electronic musician Erik Minkkinen. It was Erik who came up with Le Placard’s highly innovative concept, both artistically and socially, as an endless chain of global open-to-all experimental music events, using streaming audio servers to virtually connect performance spaces and listening spaces (the ‘placards’—French for ‘cupboards’) that in principle could be set up by anyone, anywhere and at any time.

The technical heart of a placard is a streaming audio server, like Icecast.

Improvising freely in lockdown days

Free musical improvisation has many guises. It is also one of the areas in the performing arts where the sanitary measures that were and are being imposed to prevent the ongoing spread of corona virus mutations severely hindered the working artists’ practices, often just short of bringing them to a grinding halt.

Work of musicians in one of these guises, one that is close to my heart and personal practice—the non-academic, speculative (that is how I prefer to call what usually is referred to as ‘experimental’) and ‘underground’ realms of free electro-acoustic improvisation—often depends on a largely informal and ‘unofficial’, yet vast, global network of performance hubs and residency locations. It is a network that facilitates and enables a peripatetic musical practice, a continuous moving from country to country and from city to city, while making just enough money to cover costs and buy some books here and there—along a chain of small, dedicated, venues, as well as participating in specialised festivals and events. Along the way these speculative peripateticists are lodged by locals, friends and artists, that will join them in performance, composition and recording. Being part of this action is very much like being a bee in a busy-busy, joyfully humming and hyper-creative hive. It doesn’t make one rich in the pecuniary sense (far from that), but still it’s amazingly enriching and an awful lot of fun.

Almost all of it, though, came to a sudden stop when, almost two years ago now, corona lockdown measures started ruling our lives.