Ixi Quarks improv
Group 1’s piece was very interesting or it’s structure. The first incarnation of their song I heard while we were sharing Hel-40 and they had sum phatt b3ats going with dubby wowowoms going in and out. They abandoned that for an atmospheric swishabout premise, with some sonic sounds coming in and out, like little monkeys. I heard them confabbing before they started and it seemed they went clockwise round the table to take it in turns. The knowledge I gleaned from their performance was call and response, it wasn’t glued with any rhythm but glued by a system. Bitchin’ stuff.
The group I was in miraculously got our rhythms to sync up this time and fostered a process music theme. Me and Fred were both using scratch sampler with the grain squares and had our grain densitys at 0.5. This is useful because it allows you to highlight squares of pitch used by the beep tones of our sample (talking clock) by highlighting pitch values relative to the y axis, and also helps develop a melody. With some new discoveries in Ixi Quarks we can add more interest. Bitchin’ stuff.
Group 3 had used a process music theme similar to ours. Mariana near the end had an almost dissonant cluster of notes playing together which was very appealing. It faded out very well also as she removed certain notes each bar and left it with a single tone establishing a rhythm. They had more ideas going at once but hadn’t quite managed to cohere them all, with that I think it could be very successful.
Group 4’s piece started off quite diffuse and then clippets of drum loop samples were rhythmically dropped in, eventually loping without breaks. There was a pulsing root note I think Ollie was playing which the others played around with. There were probably a few too many bum notes played in quite a shrill register which only exacerbated it. Some little hoover sounds played in which could’ve been more rhythmic as the drum loop.
Group 5’s most interesting aspect which threw me off predicting te rest was the decelerating drum loop. At first I thought it’d be some high speed tune but it wasn’t so. As the beat slowed down the other group members were clearly following the master drummer. It was ok.
Toodlepipz.
