It’s a question so elemental in music, you might forget to ask it: what can you get out of a (music) jam?

Electronic music worldwide is dominated by the DJ, the dance party. That, in turn, often tends to the safe playback and mixing of produced records. So, what happens when you let all of that go, invite your audience to get up and make strange noises with you and not only dance at a safe distance? What happens when you just set yourself free and play?

Jam sessions are nothing new in and of themselves – but the beauty of them is, put unexpected combinations of musicians together in a room, and they can always be something new. Here, I’ve invited one set of guest reports authored by the Berlin-based collective Mindpirates. Their recent set of jam sessions was notable in its varied international artists, covering the gamut from gong artist Jens Zygar to electronic artists like Machinedrum and Kid 606. Since you probably didn’t get to attend, you can experience the results through plenty of photos and videos they’ve shared with us. Californian Lionel Williams, grandchild of film composer John Williams, provides the backdrop for all of this with otherworldy, psychedelic imagery. For that reason, perhaps, the Mindpirates get happily far-out in their reflections on what all of this means, and dub the series “an adventure into the supernatural power of the jam.”

Here’s what the Mindpirates’ Easton West, Owen Roberts and Pauline Doutreluingne, tell CDM about the event and what it’s meant to them:

In January, we opened our new project space, Mindpirates Projektraum, with “Let The Sun Shine In — The Berlin Sessions.” The event included an exhibition of the supernatural collage art from the young California-based artist and musician Lionel Williams. Knowing that Williams was also a talented musician, we decided to bless our new space with a week-long series of jams between Williams, special guests, and ourselves.

The guests included visual artist Manfred Kage, Jens Zygar, Raz Ohara and The Odd Orchestra, Annika Henderson & Nick Henderson (from Anika), Hermione Frank aka rRoxymore, Jochen Arbeit (from Einstürzende Neubauten), Brian Mitchell aka 785, Valerie Renay (from Noblesse Oblige), Travis Stewart aka Machinedrum, Miguel De Pedro aka Kid 606, Verity Susman (from Electrelane), Infinite Livez, Michel Morin aka Sneak-Thief, Antaeus Roy aka Lando Kal and more.

Williams comes from a very musical background. His great-grandfather Johnny Williams was a respected jazz drummer and percussionist who played from the 30s to the 50s for the CBS Radio Orchestra, Raymond Scott, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. His grandfather John Williams has written some of the most loved and recognized film music of all time. Ed.: Yep, that John Williams. Lionel’s father Mark Williams drummed with Crosby, Stills and Nash, Tina Turner, and Air Supply.

Given the Williams family’s cross-generational success, one would expect Lionel to follow suit in his own musical endeavours. But there’s something of a sunchild in Williams that directs his varied creations. A fascination with the supernatural comes across in his artwork — abstract, yet suggestive windows into a mind filled with cosmic, mystic, and utopian images. Listening to his ambient electronic rock band Vinyl Williams, it’s apparent that Williams inhabits a slightly different artistic realm to his predecessors.

Jamming has always been an indispensable part of music-making across generations and cultures. The immediate connection people make when they combine sounds — instant, unplanned, and unrepeatable — is an incomparable experience. It allows humans to communicate in a language outside of words. The jam creates an opportunity to explore individual sounds and their relationships to one another. While exploring the relationships of tones, we explore our relationships to one another and to our environment. Improvisation demands an amount of personal development and discipline to open up the channels of communication that allow a group to function as one.

From the frequency-drenched opening performance of gong master Jens Zygar and ground breaking visuals of microphotographer Manfred Kage, to the analog dance party rhythms of our friends Michel Morin aka Sneak Thief and Antaeus Roy aka Lando Kal, the week was wildly diverse with approaches to sound, pitch, rhythm, color and texture and from a wide variety of sources.

For us, the main interest in the improvisations was a constantly-evolving relationship between acoustic instruments and digital music technology. This tension was really visible watching the performances. Williams spent a large part of the week hunched over a dizzying collection of guitar pedals while, next to him, he gathered an even more dizzying collection of musical and percussive instruments, effects and processors. Mindpirates became a melting pot of sound, color, movement, and voices, as seen in our film documentation.

Behind everything lay the real pool of inspiration, the seemingly-infinite timbral, rhythmic, and textural possibilities from a relatively small group of attuned musicians. The representation of the supernatural in The Berlin Sessions was achieved by both the organic and digital and the aural and visual. Never was it discernible where a sound began, where it was processed or the nature of that processing. All is One — a beautiful and mystical message realized through the jams.

Archival website on the project:
http://www.mindpirates.org/theberlinsessions/

Session 1: Lionel Williams, Jens Zygar, Manfred Kage & special guests

Session 2: Lionel Williams & Raz O’Hara and The Odd Orchestra

Session 3: Lionel Williams, Hermione Frank aka rRoxymore & Annika Henderson and Nick Henderson (from Anika)

Session 4: Lionel Williams, Jochen Arbeit (from Einstürzende Neubauten), Valerie Renay (from Noblesse Oblige) & Brian Mitchell aka 785

Session 5: Lionel Williams, Travis Stewart aka Machinedrum & Miguel De Pedro aka Kid 606

Session 6: Lionel Williams, Infinite Livez & Verity Susman (from Electrelane)

Session 7: Lionel Williams, Michel Morin aka Sneak-Thief, Antaeus Roy aka Lando Kal, Mindpirates & good friends

We welcome other event reports like this from around the world, particularly as I’m human and can’t be in all places at once. If you can document it, and tell us a bit about what happened, we’d love to hear from you. And we’d love to hear what has made successful – or unsuccessful – jam sessions in your musical experience.

It’s like musical survival training. Quick: you’re stuck in a hotel. Can you make some music?

Our friend Recue, aka Riku Annala, was unexpectedly being stranded in a hotel and made it into a musical opportunity. The results are damned fine listening. (Thank whatever act of God / airlines prompted this.) You can enjoy the results, free. Riku writes:

Dunno if you remember but some time ago I shared the little cheap tape head “saturation” thingy with you.

I was recently ‘stuck’ in an airport hotel room (for other reasons than music), but the good thing was that I had my mobile studio setup with me. The released set started out as this sort of a spur-of-the-moment, tongue-in-cheek live jam, as I was messing around with random hip hop/pop-music vocals on top of bits and pieces of my own projects. Eventually, it started to sound so twisted in a good way that I decided to record the whole thing. The set is split in half with the first part being a performance video and the second the complete set as audio. The tools and methods are exactly of those covered on CDM regularly (NI Maschine run as a plugin on Ableton Live and controlled by Liine Lemur on an iPad).

More:
http://www.recue.net

Sure, the accessibility and mobility of music making is seen by some as some sort of assault on civilization. (I think frankly those are the sort of people who don’t like food and hate joy, grimacing every time they pass a playground.) But if you’ve made an investment in some nice mobile music tools, put them to good use. Heck, hand-wash your underwear if you have to make more space for music tech. That next unintended layover (oops, thunderstorms) could mean a new album instead of a frustrated, wasted, lonely night. And I like to think that the beauty of modern music tech is that it salvages wonderful music we might otherwise not hear, allows it to come into being.

Have a listen to the full set, and give it a download:

We’ve passed from Record Store Day to Earth Day – and here’s the perfect segue. Having ventured into the woods to find a music release, now we can hear trees transformed, by way of sampling, into catchy rhythms. Our friend Diego Stocco, that evergreen source of creative timbres, now makes everything from trees to beans into sounds that are subtle and complex, full of personality and uniquely tied to their origin materials. There’s no real violence done to nature, either; you can make all of these noises with little more force than a small thundershower.

Remarkably, the video – shot as a promotional for Burt’s Bees – is all real-time. After-the-fact sampling manipulation is itself a fun activity, but there’s none of that business here; this is all improvisation, not editing or effects.

And that brings us to the real message of what Diego Stocco can do. Microphones matter, yes, but the real expertise here is not mic technique; it’s listening. Diego comes up with this great material because he’s had a lot of practice listening to the world around him. As the skill of his listening improves, so do his sounds, as though the planet unfolds new possibilities. (In fact, even the question of technical experience also comes down to the same idea: you’ll get better at mic selection and placement with more experimentation and listening closely to the results.)

Other examples he’s released in the past months drive that point home. In “Improv on a Plate,” the composer and sound designer plays a plate as though it’s an instrument.

I was about to cut a chocolate cake and when I moved the plate on the countertop I noticed a very interesting sound.
One side of the plate was free to vibrate because the tiles were not perfectly even, so by applying pressure with one finger and tapping it with another I was able to create some tonal beats.
I hope you’ll enjoy it!
The recording setup was very simple, Røde NT5, Apogee ONE, Pro Tools 9.

At a recent workshop at Berklee, Diego gave this advice to students explicitly: listen. (The suggestion comes across in a way that to me resonates with the teachings of Zen Buddhism – and, indeed, the teachings of just about all teachers in all disciplines. Observation is essential.)

He illustrated that point with a case study: a taxicab with a funny trunk can be the beginnings of a piece of music.

One of the things that I talked about during my sound design lecture at Berklee http://bit.ly/y89Wtr was to listen to the world around you all the time.

There are many reasons, there could be something interesting happening from a sonic standpoint, you could enrich your sound vocabulary by building references, and most of the time you can create something useful out of that recorded material.

On my way back home, I took a cab from the airport, and I noticed that there was a strange chirping noise coming from the trunk. Of course, I recorded it right away : )
I took that sound, did some work on it and created this short sound designed piece.
You’ll hear the dry sound first, and then the sound designed version, enjoy!

I can think of no better way to celebrate Earth Day than with that reflection: listening to your environment, “organic” and man-made, and the world all around you will help you discover possibilities you’ve missed. That’s not just sound design: it’s a way of (better) life. Happy Earth Day; hope you’ve all had a good weekend.

http://diegostocco.com/

For more hot mic-on-tree action this Earth Day, here’s the 2009 video Music from a Tree:

Composing with rules instead of playing notes directly, composer Richard Garrett has built a series of generative, algorithmic, ambient note makers and processors in Ableton Live and the Max for Live add-on. (And yes, user-generated content continues to be a rationale for why many people would purchase Max for Live in addition to Live itself.)

With loads of useful controls for duration, start, and voicing – and the ability to feed events into anything you like – the results in your own work could sound very different than what you see hear. But whatever your musical aspirations, you can check out the work in action in a demo video (top) and tutorial on how to work with the interface (bottom). And – provided you own Max for Live – it’s all free.

In another interesting twist, this isn’t necessarily just for making self-generating music. The event generator also has an input, so it could accompany live playing or otherwise respond to events.

Here’s how creator Richard describes the work:

I just thought I’d let you know about nwdlbots, my suite of algorithmic (generative) devices for the composition of music within Ableton Live. They include event generators, pitch and velocity selectors and control devices for interaction with each other and with other MIDI tracks and input devices.

As well as generating events at random, nwdlbots can respond to activity on other MIDI tracks in Live, or to input from a MIDI instrument. In effect, nwdlbots control the density of a piece by reducing their activity when things get too busy. They also have some rudimentary ideas about harmony and can follow a chord sequence.

The first set of nwdlbots are available for free download at sundaydance.co.uk. Also on the site: documentation and videos

By the way, this and many other conversations are now happening on LinkedIn:
Ableton Live Users @ LinkedIn [invite group]

nwdlbots (“noodlebots”), free download at Sunday Dance Music

“Noodling” sounds like a great description – and I know many of us musicians do enjoy a good noodle.

Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools from Stephen Ramsay on Vimeo.

In an extended video that begins with Radio City’s Rockettes and kettle drum players, Stephen Ramsay explains a litany of technology’s most elusive topics, in terms anyone could understand — no, really. I dare you to ask anyone to watch a few clips of this video, regardless of whether they’re regular readers of this site. Secrets such as why the programming language Lisp inspires religious devotion, or how someone in their right mind would ever consider programming onstage as a form of musical performance, represent the sort of geekery that would seem to be the domain of an elite. But in the dry deadpan of this Professor of English, those mysteries actually begin to dissolve.

I love the title: “Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools.”

I doubt very seriously that live coding is the right performance medium for all computer musicians. (I expect I’ve occasionally made people wince with a couple of lines of code in a workshop example; I shudder to think of scripting in front of an audience. I’d probably be less disastrous at stand-up comedy.) But Ramsay reveals what live coding music is. It’s compositional improvisation, and code simply lays bare the workings of the compositional mind as that process unfolds. Not everyone will understand the precise meaning of what they see, but there’s an intuitive intimacy to the odd sight of watching someone type code. It’s honest; there’s no curtain between you and the wizard.

That should be a revelation about other computer music performance instruments, even the MPC. They, too, bring in elements that are as compositional as they are about performance (though the MPC has the unique power to be both at the same time). And sometimes, it’s seeing the naked skeleton of that process that allows audiences back into the performance.

The live-coding composer in question is Andrew Sorensen, who has live-coded an orchestra and does, indeed, also use samplers in the tradition of Akai. Whether you do it in front of an audience or not, you can try his gorgeous Impromptu music language, among other tools.

If you’re messing with code at all, even just to make an occasional bleep in Csound or picture in Processing, it’s worth watching Stephen’s videos. In fact, if you compose at all, it might be worth watching. (See also his reflections on writing, programming, and algorithm.) After all, even someone strumming out a tune on an acoustic guitar and scratching the results on paper is using some sorts of algorithms.

This video has been out for a few months, but I sometimes wonder how we got into the business with blogs of posting stories with expiration dates in the hours. It’s like buying milk in Manhattan.

Thanks to Philip Age for the tip.

Sequencers by definition traditionally lock musical patterns into repetitive, unchanging blocks of time. But a new generation of generative sequencers can instead form organic patterns that change and transform.

Nodal is a totally free-as-in-beer (closed-source) sequencer for composing music. (A license is needed for commercial use.) As the name implies, it uses a matrix of nodes to represent musical structure. The best way to understand what that means exactly is to check out the examples and give the app a shot, but is good fun – and capable of creating some lovely, unusual musical textures.

The good news now is that if you’re on Windows XP/Vista, you’re no longer left out of the fun: the app now runs Universal on Mac and on Windows, as well.

Aside from Windows support, also new in version 1.1:

• New, more polished UI
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Internal MIDI synth support on Windows

It does sound as though Nodal may not remain free-as-in-beer, but with some significant updates coming later this year will move into the cheap-as-in-beer territory. Stay tuned.

Composer and co-developer Peter Mcilwain sends along the video here with a live improvisation made in the software. It’s a bit Minimalist-influenced, but shows how you can use Nodal to drive some musical inspiration. Peter also explains just what Nodal means musically to him and the small but growing collection of users taking advantage of Nodal’s paradigm:

Interest in Nodal probably centres around the fact that the software enables sophisticated, or “deep”, generative approaches within an intuitive graphical user interface that is simple and easy to use. Many users say that the program can be learnt within a short space of time and that is fun, inspiring and is fascinating to use. Once a little experience is gained people come to recognize the rich possibilities that the network approach gives them. Nodal offers a wealth of compositional possibilities that enable users to explore transformations of musical ideas quickly and easily.

Much music has been made using processes such as looping. Nodal does this too, but with a number significant additions. For example, it is possible to have loops within loops. The musical diversity that is possible takes Nodal beyond from the concept of a loop into a territory that is more like creating maps of musical pathways with which musical possibilities can be navigated. Musical materials can be played forwards and backwards, recombined or played with different rhythms. All of these transformations can happen in real-time making it a rich tool for computer assisted improvisation.
In fact working with Nodal can be very similar to more traditional composition processes. Here a small musical cell might be created which is then developed, elaborated or transformed into new material. Seen in this way, composing does not necessarily involve making a string of new ideas but instead it is the exploration of different aspects of a single idea. By limiting a composition to a small number of ideas the music maintains coherence and a sense of unity. While composers have done this manually, and in some cases masterfully, Nodal enables the transformation of idea to be automated and extended to transformational processes that would be very difficult to achieve with pen and paper.

Nodal: Generative Music Software

Previously:

Nodal: Generative Music Software for Mac (Free for Non-Commercial Use)

Tiction: Animated, Nodal Generative Music App in Progress, in Processing

Alternative Sequencers: Elysium Generative Mac App and the Joy of Hex

A Mutating Drum Step Sequencer, New MIDI Library for Processing

As an addendum to why trying to make computer models musically creative can be so disastrous, maybe the problem is we fail to understand what creativity is.

Scientists funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) have found that, when jazz musicians are engaged in the highly creative and spontaneous activity known as improvisation, a large region of the brain involved in monitoring one’s performance is shut down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thoughts and behaviors is highly activated.

Study: Prefrontal Cortex In Jazz Musicians Winds Down When Improvising [scientificblogging]

That’s just one study, and I won’t pretend to be an expert in neuroscience. But what the scientists are describing is awfully close to the nuanced way jazz musicians will describe improv. It’s not not thinking. But it’s also not self-monitoring. It’s something else.

In other words, the self-judging prefrontal cortex — the part you can easily model as a set of computer software rules — switches off, but another area of the brain hits overdrive. And “self-initiated” is exactly what’s lacking in computing technology.

But this has another implication, now that so many of us use computers in performance. For one, the lack of initiation from our computer companion means computers may be fundamentally unsatisfying as accompanists or “duets,” no matter how many rules or interactive behaviors we stuff into them. Maybe we don’t have to view them that way — maybe we should think of them as an extension of composition or an instrument. After all, a person with a laptop is usually a solo artist.

But the other likely implication is that, as many readers here have noted, we need to set up computers in ways that allow us to shot down part of the prefrontal cortex when playing. That’s a complex thing: you want your software to help you get into the zone. It doesn’t mean not thinking — quite the opposite. It means taking away distractions, partly feeling good enough about a performance to be able to stop the “self-monitoring” behavior, and partly giving yourself enough to do, musically, that another part of your brain actually has to work harder to proceed. Readers noted earlier this week that music notation can be musically distracting — not surprising, given many musicians make the effort to memorize a piece for exactly this reason.

But in addition to shutting down one section of your head, you want to activate another. That could also mean that tools that automatically limit your playing to specific scales, while they seem to make things easier, prevent your brain from reaching the level of activity when you feel the most inspired — like failing to make an exercise cardiovascular.

Thanks to Richard Lainhart for sending along this article (via the Electronic Music Foundation list).

How do you get into the zone playing live — particularly if you do use a computer?