5 years ago I gave up making records to focus on improvising electronic music. I wanted to be a one man live-jamming revolution and transform the music industry. Hopelessly naive! But in discovering my naïveté I discovered a new way to think about music — as a game.
I came to improv 15 years ago, soon after I started releasing records. I’ve been creaking under the tension between the two ever since. I was playing improv shows in venues designed for artists to perform their well-known repertoire. Likewise I was scratching my head figuring out how to turn recordings of free-flowing improv into compositions which would work on a record.
For a long time I thought it was the grit in the oyster that might one day make a pearl. But there’s something structurally different about improv that was never going to fit in an industry built on consumptive entertainment.
The big difference with improv is…
It’s about me not you
But not quite how you think.
The recorded music industry is audience-focussed. By the time an artist is on album 3 or 4 their audience will buy tickets for their shows mainly to hear them play material they wrote years ago. I often spare a thought for bands who had huge success early in their career and are still trucking — how selfless they must be to nightly rekindle the enthusiasm for that 90s hit. How painful it must be when they can’t. Because that’s what the audience expects so the audience holds all the power. The performer must surrender totally to the audience’s expectation.
Improv is the opposite. It’s an invitation for the audience to push beyond their expectations. The performer has no hit singles or script to fall back on so the fate of the audience is entirely in the performer’s hands.
The performer holds all the power…
Improv needs the total surrender of the audience
But it’s not an ego-trip for the performer.
Improv is the domain of the id. It’s at its best when the stream of self-reflexive thought melts away and the flow-state takes over. Improv is like the play of a child — unbounded by concepts or even a sense of self and other. It’s a total immersion in experience, hyper-attuned to sensory data, completely tuned out of discursive thought.
Improv is impossible without getting lost in the flow-state. I remember terrifying experiences in front of hundreds, trying to come up with original music while besieged by ego-driven narrative. It’s impossible! So paradoxically improv also demands the complete surrender of the performer.
Let’s recap…
Improv needs the total surrender of the audience + the total surrender of the performer
But you can’t just get up on stage and ask the audience to surrender.
The conditions have to be just so. Everyone in the room has to feel the right way for it to work. It’s very demanding of the audience and often doesn’t work. They must be charmed and it takes more than a performer to charm them. It takes the venue, the promoter, the tone of the copy.
The whole context of improv needs to be onboard…
Improv needs a different context
But it can’t hijack a culture.
The jazz world is a great blueprint for a context of musical improv. When I set out on my quixotic mission I looked a lot to jazz and imagined transplanting its aesthetic to a modern electronic context. I wanted to jazz-hijack the recorded music industry — to co-opt a pop-minded demographic and shoe-horn improv into their sphere of acceptability.
But the crucial bit I missed in my naïveté was that audiences and performers evolve symbiotically. A performer can’t helicopter into a cultural scenario without assiduously studying its vocabulary and rituals. If they ever manage to do this they’ve been indoctrinated by the time they have. Likewise audiences are bound by a tribal pact which conserves unwritten rules for how the music they enjoy should be enjoyed. Even a free jazz audience expects not to expect.
So it’s actually impossible to impose the values of improv on an audience that values songs they know…
My quixotic dream is over! The improv revolution, quashed by the pressures of cultural norms!
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself” — Rumi
But while weeping in the rubble I remember that improv is all about me but not quite how I think. It’s about the id not the ego. The id is immersed in the world of sensations and passing phenomena, paddling out to catch waves of experience.
The id doesn’t need an audience. The id is its own audience.
Actually…
Improv doesn’t need an audience
But the ego does.
Once upon a time I was an insufferable wannabe. I’d carry out relentless demo-bombing campaigns against labels, deploying the phone and email regiments to finish the job. Heads of A&R could only surrender. Embarrassingly convinced by the supremacy of my musical genius I was looking for an audience and never questioned what all my fuss was about.
In hindsight it was a validation thing. I wanted as much validation as I could get. I’m still a recovering narcissist but back then I was at the peak of my habit. The only way I knew to sure up my inflated self opinion was to doggedly pursue the biggest channels for my music. It worked to a certain extent but after the brouhaha I wound up with a deep unconscious belief that musical joy must be witnessed by as many as possible to be valid.
It’s the senselessness of this belief that’s been the biggest discovery on my journey and it’s so great to be free of it. I’ve realised the value of jamming for jamming’s sake, that there’s a way to enjoy music-making without the audience or the goals that are so often barriers to enjoying the creative moment for its own sake. To approach music-making like this is to approach it like a game.
Improv is a game
And I want to make it as playable as I can.
Ironically the pursuit of the ultimate improv before an audience has spurred me on to develop technology, methods and psychological resilience way beyond anything I’d have achieved had I just been improvising for my own pleasure. So although painful at times I’m very grateful for how this journey has unfolded in the end. Knowing that the real value of improv is in the experience of doing it has given me a huge burst of energy to explore the idea of music as a game and I feel I have the tools to explore what that really means.
For now all I know is that the only way to win the game of music is to get deeply lost in the flow state. The rest is to be discovered over the next few years as I set out on this new leg of the journey, posing as an unlikely hybrid between a musician, thinker, technologist and entrepreneur.
Thanks for reading! I’ll be posting more soon about music, life and the things I get up to so follow and recommend. If you want to explore my improv world, head to my shop and download FLOWs for free. It’s a software instrument for exploring and manipulating recordings from my last 5 years of improv.
If you’d like me to come and improvise in front of an audience (yes I still do that!) get in touch with Chris @ littleBig Agency chris@lb-agency.net.
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