Monday 6th June 2011
Yet another manic Monday! Well…not quite. Today was one of the more easy going days we’ve had in recent times and had but one task to occupy our minds; junk percussion research. As has been mentioned many times, Liam is big on the ethos on making music with anything you can. It’s for this reason that an area we want to explore is that of creating music with recycled objects that you’d find during everyday life. Google was our main crutch of the day, looking at and making notes of various web-sites dedicated to the art form. At times it all felt very ‘Art Attack!” you know? The children's art show with ‘Neil Buchannan’ that used to air in the 1990’s? Nostalgia aside; we found various sites and instructionals for building your own percussion instruments (minus the vast amounts of tissue paper and P.V.A. glue) something that could maybe form part of a longer workshop, whereby we spend a day making instruments then another playing them. It was a good day’s research and certainly provided us with many ideas for the coming months.
Tuesday 7th June 2011
This has been the second week of ‘fending for ourselves’ as Liam has been out on tour and doing various musical activities across the country and thus we have organised out own workload. Not wanting to be stuck in the office for three weeks most of the activities we’ve organised have been on the practical side of the spectrum and today we had the pleasure of working with Mr Gary Hammond; Firebird freelancer and acclaimed percussionist currently part of the duo “The Hut People”. Our day was more or less centred around Redwood Drive Community Hall where we embarked on a day of creative percussion.
After chatting to Gary for a while we got onto the subject of working with dancers, something we’ve been doing more of lately. After our discussion we set ourselves the task to come up with a six-seven minute musical piece to which a dance piece could be set. Working with dancers is something that Gary has a lot of experience in and before playing a note we discussed the various elements a dance piece should have; light and shade (dynamics), common time, time-signature changes and ‘free-time’; where time signature and tempo are completely disregarded.
The first movement of our piece served as a calm introduction, Pete playing the ‘thunder drum’ and I accompanied this with a slow swung ballad feel using brushes on the snare drum. We found that this worked extremely well as an intro; the soundscape aspect of the thunder drum creating tension, whilst the introduction of brush strokes on the snare added softness and a slow yet solid time feel.
The second movement of our piece created a change in feel, going from an airy half-time to a more punchy and grooving double-time section. For this, Pete played the ‘log drum’ whilst I multi-tasked, playing snare with a brush in the right hand and ‘yambu drum’ (a hybrid of the conga and cajon) with my left hand. Within in this movement we made use the ‘light & shade ’concept, starting out at a medium dynamic then bringing it down to the softest and quietest possible volume and back up to a full dynamic. This created a great effect of tension and release and also served to up the pace and mood of the piece.
Our third movement made use of a three-four Waltz feel and another change in dynamic. With a free-time section in mind towards the back-end of the piece we felt that a smooth and gradual transition was needed to take it from a solid to sparse feel. In this section I played time on the triangle, accenting the “one” of every bar whilst Pete improvised various pattern using a pair of ‘caxixi’. The choice in instruments was key to this section of the piece; the triangle being a very delicate yet solid sounding instrument and the caxixi having a full yet textural sound. This combination of instruments allowed us to create an airy mood, whilst maintaining a solid sense of time.
Carrying on with the theme from our previous movement, this fourth movement descended the piece into total soundscape, with no fixed reference of time. Our instruments for this section were; buzz bow, ocean drum, klangauge and water-phone, all very ethereal sounding. Rather than count off bars in our head we chose to go by intuition; introducing new sounds as and when the time felt right. The reasoning behind this section of the piece was to create a cushion of sound upon which the dancers will eventually have chance to improvise freely and even give them a chance to lead the dynamic and direction of the piece.
For our final movement we brought the whole piece to a crescendo, creating a dynamic climax and a peak in tempo. After jamming for several minutes (Pete on cajon and myself on snare drum) we stumbled upon a pseudo-Latin feel. Utilising a repeating snappy, syncopated pattern on the snare and a boomy driving groove on the cajon we tried our best to emulate a ‘Rio Carnival’ feel, a chance for the dancers use fast paced movements and quick changes.
Wednesday 8th May 2011
We had been looking forward to this day for some time now as we were booked in for a day with the legendary Dave ‘Stickman’ Higgins. We met Dave previously at the Artists Association meeting and his zest for life and enthusiasm made a big impression on us, the kind of person you really want to work with. Well today proved to be no let-down, arriving at Dave’s studio he greeted us with the same enthusiasm, thoroughly motivated for an afternoon of creativity. The studio was very impressive! Located on the top floor of a one-hundred and fifty year old clothes factory the whole place was, as Dave said, very reminiscent of the New York studios you see in documentaries and films, tucked away in the most unassuming of places.
Shared with a Cabaret troupe, the space was vibrant and as artsy as you like; stage costumes, drum kits, musical equipment, props, books and all manner of vibrant objects crammed into the space. To begin the session (like any good creative types should) we sat down and had a cup of tea, got to know each other and mused upon whatever subject came to mind, it set the precedent for the day, being spontaneous and wholly organic.
After chatting for a while the inevitable happened when you have three drummers in the room and not one, but two drum-kits set up! Dave played for us a while, all the time sharing with us his personal ethos when it comes to playing the kit. With a very impressive display of dual-snare drum playing and a very groove filled samba it became clear that as with everything Dave really feels what he does on the kit, pure groove. Once Dave had played I hopped onto the kit and played a couple of grooves and explained briefly my approach to playing including the whole ‘lefty on a righty kit’ thing, unfortunately this was interrupted by the annoyed bashes on the wall from the neighbours…so that put an end to that.
Amongst the vast Aladdin’s cave of costumes, instruments and artwork were several of Dave’s visual arts pieces in the form of sculptures made from re-claimed items of all descriptions. One of these pieces was created for the ‘Passport Project’, a project that explored: culture, heritage and identity, Dave talked us through this and explained what the aims of the project were and how they relate to society as a whole. After this we studied the other pieces in the room, Dave explaining the creative process behind them and what they meant to him, as well as getting us to think about what they represented and meant to us.
This proved to ignite a flame, and inspiration struck. Looking at one piece in particular as a trio we started creating verse inspired by the phrase “deep resonance” which appeared at the bottom of the sculpture, with an A2 sheet and felt tip pen at the ready the next hour saw us vibing off each other creating a thirty-three line poem exploring life, religion and politics. Once we had finished our poem, Dave recounted the time he was introduced to Cubist poetry of the 1920’s whereby the poet would create his piece and then create and entirely new piece by writing out the top line then the bottom, second from the top then second from the bottom etc, creating an entirely new arrangement of the verses and a whole new take and depth of the meaning of the piece. We carried out this process with our own poem and yielded a fascinating result; the overall sentiment of the poem remaining the same whilst discovering hidden meanings within the lines.
This proved to ignite a flame, and inspiration struck. Looking at one piece in particular as a trio we started creating verse inspired by the phrase “deep resonance” which appeared at the bottom of the sculpture, with an A2 sheet and felt tip pen at the ready the next hour saw us vibing off each other creating a thirty-three line poem exploring life, religion and politics. Once we had finished our poem, Dave recounted the time he was introduced to Cubist poetry of the 1920’s whereby the poet would create his piece and then create and entirely new piece by writing out the top line then the bottom, second from the top then second from the bottom etc, creating an entirely new arrangement of the verses and a whole new take and depth of the meaning of the piece. We carried out this process with our own poem and yielded a fascinating result; the overall sentiment of the poem remaining the same whilst discovering hidden meanings within the lines.
After reflecting on what we had created we came up with plans to take it to the next level, the idea being to have three drum-kits set up in the room and break the poem up into movements or sections, creating grooves and rhythms to accompany the spoken word delivery of the poem. We all look forward to having this session and can hopefully get it booked sooner rather than later as we all had a great time collaborating as creative people and feel like we created something important, that has to be shared.
Movement five from our dance accompaniment piece (segement):
The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX
01522 811229
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