An early stylistic exploration--while Bruce Lee might fear the person who practices 1 kick 10,000 times, this session is the equivalent of hearing a violinist/violist practice 10,000 kinds of kicks about 2 to 34 times so there's a lot of work to do in refining any of the vectors we might choose to pursue before something radically developed on a stylistic or compositional level emerges.
Early in the video you'll hear:
-an unnecessarily aggressive take on part of a Japanese children's song (Oedo Nihonbashi -- at least the part I could remember) where I tried to replicate my memory of a raw and jarring koto melody by maintaining ponticello technique on the instrument. [After finding the original reference recording -- in the Favorite/Nostalgic Melodies of Japan album, the perceived jarring sound came from being unfamiliar with some non-western tunings]
-influences from traditional shakuhachi flute stylizations [as heard in Minoru Minuoka's Japanese Koto Funk] Ponticello technique on violin, viola, or any bowed string instrument that you can play with ponticello lends itself well to imitating the smoky wind style heard in shakuhachi playing if done with subtlety -- I was somewhat successful in maintaining character and can do a lot to develop a more compelling sound with it further
-As a side note, I'm experimenting with ways to normalize or make the scratchy sound that comes with ponticello on a stringed instrument interesting and "beautiful" in its own right, the shakuhachi emulation is probably the closest thing I've found beyond using it for textural purposes or as an aggressive distortion in sound
-Flexing in and out of traditional intonation with microtonal fluctuations to explore beat patterns that sometimes emerge from playing sympathetic strings that are slighly out of tune together
-One surprise: the "beat effect" that comes when playing two notes that are very close to each other in intonation don't carry to the microphone well compared to what you can feel on the instrument as the player. I'd be interested to hear how the same effect gets picked up in professional recordings where I did that same effect on multiple occasions with Synergistic Mythologies at the DSO Cube for the 2018 Strange Beautiful Music Festival in September
-Discovering the strings are already out of tune to each other without any help ; )
-Finding ways to "play with the environment" -- a swelling overtone in the parking structure amplifies when playing just mildly sharp of the D natural that's unique to that particular part of the structure
-A brief quote of an ascending motif from an Alfredo Piatti Cello Caprice -- with a daring microtonal twist that makes it sound a little less good than I thought it would!
-Improvisation in Balkan and Roma-esque modes with some non-western intonation
-A quick quote from a motif in a pan flute melody (called “pan flute melody” when translated out of French) from the group called Djelem -Later you'll hear simple 1 degree templamatic derivations of traditional Balkan tune(s) like the Gankino Hora--likely played in the wrong meter--and another one I've yet to learn the name of titled on youtube as "Bud Vibe" via kungfudru's youtube account [ the drummer playing in a group that would eventually become the Balkan funk band Ornamatik/RytaMusik's] -An attempt to play in non 4/4 time signatures (probably a 7/8) -- and sometimes straying back into 4/4 after forgetting the attempt or getting rhythmically lost altogether with the counting and grooving
-A new jam pattern(!!)
-An appreciative audience member shouting from several stories below
FIN (due to space constraints and a crashed hard drive) Also, accelerometer in the phone somehow didn't read the horizontal orientation and now I'm not sure how to rotate the video short of getting more sophisticated video editing software. Might reupload in the future when we can take care of that.
