The importance of not-improvising
Jun. 25th, 2009 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThe first performance of Joemus the band last night at West Germany in Kreuzberg was pretty dire, to be honest. If only I'd listened to Mark E. Smith! In Slates he shouts at The Fall, bashing out a primitive riff behind him: "Don't start improvising, for god's sake!"
What we did last night -- playing everything live by hand, with no material prepared (unless you count the paper masks Joe and Bastien assembled) and just making it all up as we went along -- is very much a Berlin thing to do. When I do shows outside Berlin, I both respect and disrespect the audience. I respect them in the sense that I give them highly-edited, polished pieces of music I know in advance they're going to like. I disrespect them in the sense that I don't "challenge" them by doing anything too weird and unexpected. But because Berlin is a big laboratory, an experimental city, I like to try out different things when I play live here. My last show consisted of remade versions of songs I'd written in my teens and rejected because they were embarrassing. This time, we decided to improvise. The idea was to recreate onstage the process of making the Joemus album, rather than simply recreate the finished album.
The results -- when I listened back to the recording I made -- were depressing. Joe and Bastien had technical problems, while I flailed around trying not to rhyme "park" with "dark" and "tree" with "sea". There was one moment when the ghost of a nice song -- something a bit like Gilbert and Lewis (from Wire), a bit like Modern English, a bit early 80s and melancholic -- emerged. Here it is:
Modern English (mp3 file, mono, 4MB, 4mins 18secs)
At other moments I rapped (in the "Cockney menace" style of my collaborations with o.lamm and Hypo) about a Mrs Abraham Jones ("running from a burning Bible, with her hair on fire, with blood spilling from her foot, screaming of nothing and frightened of the world") or made up a tale of "three significant stalkers, stalking me all the time". It's the kind of improv I do in my art performances with language, and I've done it successfully in a musical context with, for instance, the loop-building pedal delay trick and Tomoko Miyata's bowl music.
But this time -- perhaps because I know Joe's capable of shining when he broaches shaped pop structures -- my feeling is it fell flat. We never really got started. We could've done so much more with the audience's time and attention. I came away from the first Joemus-as-band show more than ever convinced that you should do this kind of brainstorming in private, edit ruthlessly and meticulously, and only confront the public when you've got something worth showing them. Even in Berlin.
What we did last night -- playing everything live by hand, with no material prepared (unless you count the paper masks Joe and Bastien assembled) and just making it all up as we went along -- is very much a Berlin thing to do. When I do shows outside Berlin, I both respect and disrespect the audience. I respect them in the sense that I give them highly-edited, polished pieces of music I know in advance they're going to like. I disrespect them in the sense that I don't "challenge" them by doing anything too weird and unexpected. But because Berlin is a big laboratory, an experimental city, I like to try out different things when I play live here. My last show consisted of remade versions of songs I'd written in my teens and rejected because they were embarrassing. This time, we decided to improvise. The idea was to recreate onstage the process of making the Joemus album, rather than simply recreate the finished album.
The results -- when I listened back to the recording I made -- were depressing. Joe and Bastien had technical problems, while I flailed around trying not to rhyme "park" with "dark" and "tree" with "sea". There was one moment when the ghost of a nice song -- something a bit like Gilbert and Lewis (from Wire), a bit like Modern English, a bit early 80s and melancholic -- emerged. Here it is:Modern English (mp3 file, mono, 4MB, 4mins 18secs)
At other moments I rapped (in the "Cockney menace" style of my collaborations with o.lamm and Hypo) about a Mrs Abraham Jones ("running from a burning Bible, with her hair on fire, with blood spilling from her foot, screaming of nothing and frightened of the world") or made up a tale of "three significant stalkers, stalking me all the time". It's the kind of improv I do in my art performances with language, and I've done it successfully in a musical context with, for instance, the loop-building pedal delay trick and Tomoko Miyata's bowl music.
But this time -- perhaps because I know Joe's capable of shining when he broaches shaped pop structures -- my feeling is it fell flat. We never really got started. We could've done so much more with the audience's time and attention. I came away from the first Joemus-as-band show more than ever convinced that you should do this kind of brainstorming in private, edit ruthlessly and meticulously, and only confront the public when you've got something worth showing them. Even in Berlin.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 09:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2009-06-25 10:50 am (UTC)the Fall flat?
Date: 2009-06-25 10:57 am (UTC)Re: the Fall flat?
Date: 2009-06-25 11:10 am (UTC)Also, public failures are important because they give us all breathing space. If we could fail in front of each other a little more I think it may serve to loosen up the creative juices on a wider level. Learn to fail or fail to learn, as they're fond of saying in Positive Psychology ...
Re: the Fall flat?
Date: 2009-06-25 11:20 am (UTC)What happens when you fail? What is it to fail?
Have we been conditioned to expect a 'finished product'? What is a finished product?
Re: the Fall flat?
Date: 2009-06-25 11:25 am (UTC)Re: the Fall flat?
Date: 2009-06-25 11:33 am (UTC)As a sidenote, art galleries are places that, at their best, make it their project to confound expectations; in other words, the visitor often does not know what to expect, and in this sense they are one of the few places within a society that has the ability/freedom/will to do this. And perhaps this is part of the appeal of the gallery.
What about the gig? Are expectations useful?
Also, I wonder if the venue charged money for the Momus gig, and how this might have affected things ..
(Disclaimer: My opinion is not rooted within any of the aphorisms used here. Please challenge vigorously!)
Re: the Fall flat?
Date: 2009-06-25 11:40 am (UTC)Re: the Fall flat?
Date: 2009-06-25 12:03 pm (UTC)6 Euros seems like a good price to me!
Re: the Fall flat?
Date: 2009-06-25 11:47 am (UTC)I'm sure Tasos and Rinus won't mind if I give potted reviews; I liked the textures in Tasos' set, but I've seen too many solo artists using this sample/repeat layering thing over the last four years or so, and it's no longer enough to dazzle audiences. Your heart begins to sink when you see someone's going to do a show this way, because you know it's going to be a succession of sounds in short loops, building to a climax and then ebbing away. However interesting the individual sounds might be, it turns into a big grey soup, and nothing like "composition" (ie surprise) will ever intrude. It's overdone, and I wish people would just trash their copies of SooperLooper (http://www.essej.net/sooperlooper/) and try something else.
As for Topmodel, I've seen great shows by them, and endorsed (http://imomus.livejournal.com/397896.html) them in my Spanish music mag column. But last night was their weakest show so far; the Casios sounded as if the batteries were flat, the scat singing in a made-up language went nowhere, and the set wandered through a wilderness of half-hearted abstraction, leaving the audience fatigued and uninvolved. Their usual sense of fun and invention seemed to have abandoned them.
And then we came on and sounded like -- as Rinus put it afterwards -- a Topmodel remix!
two helpings of soup
Date: 2009-06-25 12:01 pm (UTC)Re: two helpings of soup
Date: 2009-06-25 01:36 pm (UTC)charming failure
Date: 2009-06-25 05:00 pm (UTC)but somehow it is true for all of us,
(as you already pointed out)
i don't know what kind of grim ghost we woke up on that eve.
for me it was an uncomfortable situation all through the set,
and this got transmitted to mireia and magnus the other two topmodels.
with a different positioning
(in front of the speakers, so that we could actually hear what we were doing, it would all have been different. now i could only guess what it was like, while playing as my own automatic pilot)
topmodels birthday is on 7th of july,
no idea yet where to celebrate.
but for sure we will celebrate
as you indicated, too many great moments, fun and happyness to stop now.
see you on our next appointment on our mutual berlin tour
greetings from flughafensstrasse,
rinus
maybe it is the kind of bash on the nose you need sometimes.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 11:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-09 08:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 11:25 am (UTC)Male bonding
Date: 2009-06-25 12:30 pm (UTC)We could surmise that male bonding is what audiences pay for. The rock band. "Top Gear" - motoring as excuse to watch ribbing, snigger, pisstake.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 12:32 pm (UTC)Clip (http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=97484682711&ref=mf).
RIP in WC1
Date: 2009-06-25 01:07 pm (UTC)Re: RIP in WC1
Date: 2009-06-25 01:11 pm (UTC)Re: RIP in WC1
Date: 2009-06-25 03:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 01:28 pm (UTC)Quite like
Date: 2009-06-25 05:25 pm (UTC)Cheers,
Jake. (do you remember me from my days at Which? magazine?)
More
Date: 2009-06-25 05:32 pm (UTC)Are you planning to come to Vienna in the distant future?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 06:45 pm (UTC)One of my friends attended the gig and I'm curious to learn what he thought of the performances.
I saw some brief bits of phone-shot footage on FB, but nothing is showing up on youtube yet.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 08:20 pm (UTC)I really felt as if I'd let my little audience of 25 mathematical neophytes down something rotten, and I was pretty upset about that, so I can sympathise with how you feel there.
I can also really appreciate your points on only putting out well-honed and beautifully-produced stuff. My music production skills are pretty awful and most of the tracks I've done sound rather dismal, so I have a stack of unfinished stuff on my HD. Plus I'm panicking a bit because I've got a job as a web developer now, and something I've done is due to go live next week and I keep finding bugz...
Don't beat yourself up too much over this (easier said than done, I know!) Over the years you've provided the world with loads of high-quality material that's provoked thought and laughter in the audience. Having a crack at something a bit different and finding it a bit 'meh' is part of the process I guess.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 09:26 pm (UTC)of course i haven't heard the rest of the performance, but if anything I think it makes a pretty convincing case for improvised performance & selective (but minimal) editing.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 09:28 pm (UTC)And it is refreshing to read such reflective, concise self criticism too - many artists would have refused to accept such 'failure', real or perceived. It is also a question of how you perceive failure - if you intended to improvise, and really improvised, then from that angle, it wasn't failure. Here, it just didn't work out as you'd liked sonically, but that's a bit beside the point.
So, do keep improvising. You have to take the rough with the smooth as it were. Personally, my live work is generally all improv, but I have prepared the materials I want to use beforehand, so it's not completely left to chance. In my case using broken and scrap appliances, there's always the probability something will break down, not react as planned, or fuck up in some other way. I've learned to love this though, the spur of the moment decisons and discipline it requires to keep things moving are addictive!
And within any given show, there are moments I think were special, and plenty of dull or inconsistent parts. I'm sure your show was the same. Listen to it again later - no performance is ALL bad.
here's some of my recent silliness, hopefully it'll make you feel better!
twit opera should have read
Date: 2009-06-25 09:49 pm (UTC)joe
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 11:41 pm (UTC)you usually brim with verve and experimental zeal so why the second guessing ?maybe because there were three ..you feel responsible. forget your "proper"upbringing and social mores etc. great art is made by confident and self obsessed sociopathic narcissists . not polite considerate gentlemen. so do not apologize.
once the dust has settled and your reevaluating your career, it will probably be a highlight. sometimes you dont know how good you are until time passages illuminate ,as they say.
on saying that i saw your "rehearsed" show in stereo glasgow last year.still my fav gig of all time so maybe you have a point. maybe mix and match..but keep on pushing that envelope...
don't give up
Date: 2009-06-26 10:04 am (UTC)peace
jhon g
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 04:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 01:06 pm (UTC)One of my favourite ever concerts was the one you did in that pub in Hackney 3 years back before about 40 people (about half of whom were in the pub anyway, probably), where you forgot the words and came out with that same ME Smith quote as you do here (though with Smith you never know if he's being sarcastic, or even whether the character in the song is).
Great stuff, though.
Stephen Parkin
calm down!
Date: 2009-06-28 10:10 pm (UTC)and to be honest - i liked it, that momus tried to improvise.. it is too easy to stick to the familiar and routine things.
actually i would like to give joemus another live-try!!
chrizzi