Comments on free improvisation

Comments on free improvisation

- Audio: Untitled Beginning from the album Early Summer by Wade Matthews, released by con-v in 2010.

Wade Mathews. Musician and member of Cruce: To me, improvising is about listening and not about playing. Essentially, free improvisation is a way of interacting. Free improvisation is defined by how musicians interact with each other, and sound is a vehicle for establishing these interactions. Given that sound is the vehicle, interaction is established through hearing. I think this is interesting in principle because what the audience and the musicians are doing is basically the same. What brings them together, creating energy loops between them, is precisely the act of listening.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro. Musician and former member of IBA Col.lectiu d'improvisació: To be honest, I can hardly listen when I’m playing. It’s something that you can’t listen to. However, I feel a vibration, and that’s what I respond to. Sometimes I don’t even know what the other musicians are doing, but I’m there and I know that I’m there because I feel that vibration.

One of the Improkup participants: I think that improvisation is constantly highlighting the problematic relationship between the individual and the collective. This is an issue that is being broached from different angles at Improkup.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro: Maybe free improvisation is the freedom to use whatever you want, from everyday objects to technology… There’re many possibilities, and that’s what makes it interesting, to make use of all those objects at your disposal. For me, it’s the only space where that can happen.

One of the Improkup participants: I’m more and more convinced that it’s actually the opposite, that it’s not an exercise in freedom but an on-going questioning of how that freedom is built and to what extent we’re free.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro: I think there’s no freedom to it at all. Free improvisation? Well, yeah, it’s free because it’s not related to what is usually understood as improvisation, which most of the times is associated to jazz. It’s free from that, maybe, but I’m not sure the word ‘free’ is the best word to use, although improvisation has existed for centuries in many music genres. Freedom doesn’t exist. What we have is the power of making decisions, but once the decision is made, where’s the freedom when we can’t escape the real?

One of the Improkup participants: What interests me is the perversion implied in using co-existence and duration as ways of understanding improvisation and noise.

Wade Matthews: A pedestal has a meaning; it’s not innocent in relation to the sculpture. A pedestal serves essentially as an isolator, its function being to separate the work of art from the quotidian. The frame plays the same role. It may be seen as a delimiting element, in the sense that it’s restrictive and defines the boundaries of what is art. But what it essentially delimits is the everyday life that surrounds the work of art. It says “what’s within this frame is art, and what’s outside this frame isn’t”. And this idea of defining art as something that is fundamentally separated from our everyday life starts disappearing in the 20th century. It’s interesting to see how this process runs parallel to the rise of science.

One of the Improkup participants: It may be problematic because of the fetishisation of the moment, but at the same time, trying to “put everything” in that moment clashes with contemporary art because artists are against laying everything on the table at once.

Wade Matthews: This (slow tempo whistles) and this (fast tempo whistles) have different tempos, but not because real time is faster. We don’t age earlier if time runs faster or live more slowly if time runs more slowly. It’s pure representation. When art abandons representation and enters the real, the frame, the pedestal and the idea that art is a separate space disappear. In free improvisation, there’s something which is deeply rooted. We’re not representing a moment and a place; we’re reflecting a moment and a place.

- Audio: Improkup recordings

One of the Improkup participants: Improkup resulted from a series of actions I and someone else, along with more people, carried out in gaztetxes (squat houses), in Euskalherria. The idea was to “squat” the gaztetxe, to just go there. Sometimes they knew we were going and sometimes they didn’t. We tried to improvise with the situation. This is the minimum required to organize an event, to get together and play, to discuss and share certain intentions and interests and to carry out actions together; to occupy a space and inhabit it for a weekend; to occupy an abandoned factory and record everything there… When we’re recording everything, there’s a tension that I think is very interesting, and that is the co-existence with aesthetics. At that moment, it was more about playing together and delivering certain pieces, but once you play the recording and say that it was an improvisation, you deal with aspects of improvisation that are really interesting.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro: It wasn’t exactly a space but a collective called IBA Col.lectiu d'Improvisació. Many people joined and left during the time it was active. In my area it was three of us: Ruth Barberán, Ferrán Fages and me. Ferrán left four years ago. I left three years ago and now it’s just Ruth. The problem is that we never had a space of our own, though we could use several spaces and sometimes performed in private flats, just solos and duos, always small scale, in small groups. We used acoustic instruments or minimum amplification because in a private space you can’t make the same noise that you do in a bigger space or a public space. It wasn’t about elitism, it’s just that there were no spaces available and we were a bit tired of fighting with institutions in vain.

Wade Matthews: Manolo Quejido used to run a space that was called La Nave, a large industrial warehouse that was broken down into studies that were, for the most part, devoted to painting. At one point, Quejido and an old friend of his, Fernando Carbonel, came up with the idea of setting up an exchange art project involving philosophy, plastic arts, and poetry. They contacted me with the aim of introducing music in the project. That’s when Cruce started. I joined the project a little later; I’m not a founding member. Since the beginning, there was that interest in establishing dialogues between artists and between different artistic disciplines and I started to bring musician from Europe that were involved in the free-improvisation scene.

- Audio: CLAIR de B'EE A piece for paper by Alfredo Costa Monteiro published by Compost & Height on 2008

One of the Improkup participants: What do you do when you are involved in a conversation in which you’re trying to understand what it’s being said? To consider it sound is very interesting to me because it breaks the sound, making it more difficult to aestheticize it because you’re trying to understand what’s being said at the same time. So here that signification, which improvisation has always rejected, is always present. It’s not the abstraction of sound anymore; it’s something more concrete, certain words, certain sentences with an aesthetic quality. If you play it on record, something very interesting happens when you include conversations in improvisations; conversations that are usually rejected for their lack of abstraction.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro: Thinking entails different ways of doing, and one of them is sound. In fact, it’s closely related to thinking because it’s just as abstract. Playing together involves sharing an idea of what we’re doing, that is, a thought.

One of the Improkup participants: It invites us to reflect on improvisation in general and on the fascination for abstraction that we’ve felt for so many years, trying not to be literal or to play with significance in a direct way.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro: I’m talking about improvised music because there’s nothing pre-established. Well, there is, but it’s supposed there isn’t. So it’s not a different way of doing; I’d rather call it that and not music, a way of doing that would indeed be pre-established and that, therefore, would address a thought that would also be pre-established. We start off from a supposed void to try to build something together.

One of the Improkup participants: I think language and conversations have a lot of that. There’s much more noise in language than we usually think. It’s interesting to present conversation as noise and try to see all those abstract characters and the excesses of conversation in itself. We could say that even this conversation, that is taking place in an institution such as the Reina Sofía, is generating a quite relevant cultural value.

Wade Matthews: I don’t know whether all sounds are pleasant or whether they’re interesting. I’m not going to make an overarching categorization of any of the sides. What I know is that if there were a greater sensibility towards sound and towards sound quality, if this is really a democracy, this should be given a thought. People living in Madrid wouldn’t accept things like, for example, the anti-noise legislation, which doesn’t mention traffic and construction noise.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro: That vibration something primitive, it’s there. From the ear to the mouth and from the mouth to the ear there isn’t much distance. Would there be sound without listening? A sound that is not heard doesn’t exist. I think that primordial vibration is there and, in fact, all the music we do is, in a way, an attempt to go back to that because we are in fact producing very primitive sounds, if you look at it differently. Of course, we’re producing complex sounds, but there’s a search for something that is absolutely primitive, or at least that’s what I’m trying to do. And I think many musicians, whether they’re aware of it or not, are working in this direction, trying to find that first sound in some way. I’m not saying that we’re looking for the first sound ever, but there’s something that is linked to it, I think.

One of the Improkup participants: I don’t know, that doesn’t seem noise to me. In my opinion, the inherent nature of noise is about reaching the lowest of the lowest, the shit of shit, and explore there. It’s about becoming interested in what nobody cares about.