weimerhead

This week’s improvisation session sounded possibly worse than last week. The additional of two tone-exploring synthesizers had much to do with this I feel. Every week in the improvisation session I seem to pick up some way to improve my drum loops, usually in response to critisms made by my colleagues. Again this week Dave was the catalyst here, suggesting that listening to the same two-bar loop for the hour can get a little tedious (no surprises here). I have decided then, that maybe it would be a good idea to create longer samples, so that they take longer to loop over, and are not as grating. Also Dave suggested maybe adding ‘fills’ to the performance, reminding me of an idea I formed weeks ago- to set the drum loops to group A (within Live) and a continuously playing (but muted) fill to group B. Hence, whenever I feel the time is appropriate, I pan across to group B and play a fill. Thankfully, the issues I had last week have been overcome, that is, no longer are people complaining that the drums cut-out completely and leaving them exposed as the tentative improvisers they mostly are. I achieved this by implementing the idea I specified last week.

This week’s presentations included Tyrell, Poppi, Albert and Josh. I particularly enjoyed Poppi’s presentation. Her movies were very intriguing and well suited to the music, as was her solemn ‘spoken word.’ All of these films were cut short for the sake of saving time, but now I would really like to see more. This might sound a little strange, but the movies were very typical of a uni student, if that makes any sense. Probably not. Tyrell talked a bit about the music he has been making for video games. I was pretty interested to hear something of composed by Tyrell, but unfortunately he mainly played us music he created for a video game for children so the emotional depth was severely shunned, in place of… well… childhood cheesiness. Despite the fact Josh seemed about as excited about his musique concrete piece, as I am about going to work 21 minutes, I thought the piece was really very good. Interesting too that when I went up and talk about my piece I spouted about some elaborate story of a mythological hero and the best that Josh could say is that ‘he tried to use sounds that sound metallic’, yet that the final result is reasonably similar. But hey, if it were the final sound that counted, words like Scheonburg and Boulez might not sound like more than fancy small cars or import wines (and I am going to hell).