Decision

Today Scott Cazan and myself tasked ourselves with the creation of a new piece in one day. I suppose I am the one who came up with that rule as Scott noted, but all the same, we finished the piece. Along the way I learned some pretty interesting stuff.

We began by talking about how the piece would go, workflow ideas and there we stumbled on the fact that I tend to work with a conceptual framework and Scott tends to make things that are performative. By this I understand that he creates pieces of software that the computer performs or he creates a set or rules/ideas etc and then performs the piece. I on the other hand place layers in a time line and have a sense that I will make decisions about direction and implementation along the way.

So once he graciously agreed to work in my format we were off. I suppose we never debated the merit of working one way or another, we just noted it.

Once we had each taken the role of creative director several times, we had amassed a good amount of material and a decent form. The creation of this material had been the result of instructions by one and performance by the other. I had instructed Scott to create the "A monkey in the sound of an angel" while he directed some of my violin improvisations and ordered the textual components.

Now that the first version was complete there was a bit of manipulation to be done, for this we each took the bounce of the piece and had 20 minutes in which to manipulate it. This was very revealing.

I took and compressed the piece again and again, did some pitch shifting, then expanded it. Essentially I created a rule and did it repeatedly and with some variation. Scott took two sections and looped them, then swept the bit crusher. This was very performative. I didn't really pick up on this until the end of the project.

So then the final edit, where we dumped all the tracks in and attempted to form it all into a nice mass. And well, I think it worked well.

LISTEN HERE
As Scott said, "Sort of a one day vacation." Yeah, sonic vacation.