Re: creativity

["Larry Tremblay" <ltct@concentric.net>]

RE: Creativity & Randomness

In the late-70's/early 80's I was a member of a band called
M.A.D.(Mutual Assured Destruction), which consited of myself
and two others.. On our first recording session each of us
took turns recording a track without being to hear what the
other member recorded previously. The only limitation was
that the next person  to record had to choose an instrument
that wasn't used before. You only got one take and allowed
only one instrument.

This was an adaptation of the surrealists' Atrocity
Exhibition approach as applied to 'music'.

Noisy as hell but a big idea generator. It was interesting
from the perspective that the mind will attempt to impose
order even on the most extreme racket. As a bonus, the happy
accidents also begin to sound intentional. You can then use
these raw materials as inputs to the next stage of the music
process.

- Larry T

> Here is my most simple, practical approach :
>
> Lower the output volume of the EDP and create a loop while unable to hear
it.
>
> Go with the randomness.
>
> More comments : Have you ever seen the book, "The Advancing Guitarist"?
The whole book is filled with approaches to growing, overcoming barriers.
Much of it is instrument independent.
>
> Loopily,
> K
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> rich@nuvision.com on 04/24/2000 03:28:41 PM
> Please respond to Loopers-Delight@annihilist.com@SMTP
> To: Loopers-Delight@annihilist.com@SMTP
> cc:
> Subject: Re: creativity
> Classification: Restricted
> >1. graphs
> >    -when I feel limited in a particular piece I'll often work from a
graph.
> >for instance, my ambient project used to play a chart of stock market
> >returns over the past 50 years.  very fun!  we would "notate" the graph
with
> >colors for moods (blue=sad, red=intense, green=layered, etc) and 
>indicate
> >how long (length of time) each section would roughly take.  some great
> >results with this one.
>
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>
> I had a couple of interesting performances a few years ago based on this
> idea.  The performance was called Kaballah Clocks and it was a half hour
> piece, based tonally on the 10 'stations' of the mystical Kaballah.  Each
> station has a 'color' associated with it.  Color resonates at a certain
> light frequency, and we associated those (angstrom?) frequencies with Hz
> frequencies of sound, so each 'station' had a tonal drone that we
> improvised within.  Each member of the ensemble had a clock in front of
> them and we played in each 'station' for 3 minutes, and then mutated to
the
> next, and to the next, culminating at the top station of the Kaballah,
> associated with Brilliant White light.
>
> Definitely a noisy piece, but what a crescendo!  We were purely
> improvising, and made no grandiose pretensions about how good the piece
was
> going to be.  Afterwards, though, we had people coming up and saying how
> amazing it was, and that they had drifted off into some state of
meditation
> during the piece, even though we had not introduced it in any way...it
just
> was the end of our set.
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> Super fun and musically/experimentally/spiritually rewarding
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> rich
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