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Impro sessions at Dolan

By thisisuser on September 22, 2012

I have received all the edited and mastered audio files back from the interactive recording session at the James L. Dolan studio at NYU Steinhardt, back in April 2012. It was once again a very fruitful stay, and I was glad that my two-year Visiting Faculty Artist relation with the University was extended, with no end date defined. At this visit I focused on duo sessions, but I did also do one ensemble impro session as well as premiering and recording a large-scale chamber work. Here I will speak of three duo sessions that share similarities while their difference outlines some of the immediate steps to take, both in programming my performance patch and in the performer instructions to give.

The sessions with Drew Gress (double-bass), Jean-Michel Pilc (piano) and Brad Shepik (guitar) were all of a similar approach – and I was largely using the same set-ups – but came out very differently each. I ascribe this to the different personality of the players, and to some degrees the nature of their instruments. With Jean-Michel Pilc there was a situation of almost instant composition, and the following edit session was a very straightforward business, even though it always presents challenges. I added one Lars from Mars track from my upcoming release for the Mindwaves label, but it has indeed very little to do with what I am planning for that release. This also tells me how much improvised these sessions were, and in fact how very open my performance patch is – something that I have wanted but never really put to the test. Here are the tracks, five in all:


The session with Drew Gress turned out differently, in part because the role of the double-bass was not defined beforehand. It seems somewhat contradictory to accompany a computer, even though the computer creates its music in realtime. On the other hand, it is not a truly solo instrument, in spite of the virtuosity of the player. This means that an intermediate role must be created, and possibly with a different concept of what this particular instrument-machine combination. The session gave us three tracks:

Finally, I made a session with guitarist Brad Shepik, with was edited down to two longer tracks with looser structures. These recordings were more like continued conversation where the subject matter continuously evolves, and the subsequent editing was much more difficult, since clear sections were not so easy to find:

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I have over the years released a considerable amount of music as composer, flute and laptop performer and producer on digital and physical media – vinyl, cassette, CD, DVD. You will find all this material including listening links on the recordings page.

The programming I am doing for my own electronica and interactive music performance purposes has let me into research topics that have spun off a few snippets of generally useful software. This is available in the toolbox page.

Finally, the 3D Sound Object is a sound diffusion concept that holds very interesting artistic promises, and I am discussing the concept and pieces I have made on the 3D Sound Object page.