The Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra Global telematic improvisation group have played on ZOOM every week since March 2020.
For this work we reveal the spontaneous distributed creativity amongst intergenerational, inter-disciplinary musicians from New York, California, Mexico, Wales, Scotland and Spain, as we co-create a response to you callout for submissions.
We collectively reviewed the callout and crowd-sourced ideas - but focused to record a 24 minute piece based on "attention, memory and expectation" which we used time stretch to extend this piece to 200% speed, 400%, 800%, 400%, 200%, and back to 100% (and variations on this sequence) for 24 hours, inspired by Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho. This work responds to Chris Parfitt and Jessica Argo's ideas about when we listen to music (or just when we exist in the world) we have attention on the present, expectation of the future and memory of the past (and the way we perceive the present is coloured by our memory of the past / and the impatience of our expectation of the future (based on musicology theory from Wilson Coker and David Huron)
Jessica Argo has assembled an edit of the conversational camaraderie, framing and construction of the piece which happens to weave in personal, national and global conflicts, tensions and alienation of capitalist exploitation of labour, that is often spontaneously reflected on as we console eachother and construct artistic responses, spontaneously in real-time.
We collectively reviewed the callout and crowd-sourced ideas including:
- a minute long piece, repeat it for 24 hours (Chris)
- there seems to be an expectation that the artist would set up generative system to run 24 hrs - what does it mean if its humans, durational.... (Jess)
- we have 700 hours worth of archive recorded since 2020 - how to incorporate our musical past into our musical present?
- interest of improv is elements coming from each individual, thinking up interesting original sounds come out of each individuals lifestyle - why not break down the improvisation into every performer's component and string them out over 24 hours - stop and then the next thing - cut up the stems - single ideas 20 ideas strung together (process - important - democratic (got the transcript) (Constance)
- what is lost? (Jess)
- breathe in and out sound inside - then you have the sound (Bernd)
Whilst we played as Jessica shared screen with fragments our feature-length compilation of commissioned artists films recently screened at Glasgow CCA's Gallus Disruptors event, scrubbing through time and visually zooming in perhaps overlooked small details, to mimic the selective focus during attention to the present, and fragmentation of memory.
This work re-invents ideas from Jessica Argo's 2013 solo experimental animation and soundscape, Harmonising the Musical Present with the Musical Past (https://youtu.be/FaSKPuu_c84?si=zlqjGhU-GJRkiGB_), re-imagined as a collective.
The films that the group respond to on the ZOOM call are obscured in this audio-only format - but its important to know that the audio format captures brief audio snippets of these original outputs that were catalysed by animated graphic scores, hand painted prompts and directed virtual backgrounds in works composed by Robert Burke (Melbourne, Australia), Yasuko Kaneko (Okoyama Japan), Instant Places (Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse, Ottowa, Canada). Also featured are audio excerpts from site-specific pieces spontaneously arising from the travels of our regular performers, from welding workshops to hilltop sprints. Ideas that traverse domestic and performance spaces, and those that blur the boundaries of the virtual and physical space are at the heart of our creative practice (and this piece)"
