At some point in my set I was to make a piece that incorporated sounds from the SoundMakers sample database, but it was also important that my set be no longer than 35 minutes in length, so the TSO could start on time. I am used to playing much longer sets, in which I can take my time developing ideas,  exploring electronic textures, and transitioning to beat-driven pieces and of course, improvising. So I had to give it some careful thought — I wanted all of the elements of my music to be represented, but I didn’t want it to be a random smorgasbord – one of my biggest focuses is crafting cohesive set is. I decided to put the SoundMakers Sounscape in the middle of my set as a sort of ambient Intermezzo between the more energetic and intense pieces.

I opened my set with a solo piano piece called “Introitus”, which employs (English style) Renaissance counterpoint, set against an arabic melody, moving into an electronic, breakbeat-driven piece “Mercurial” which is in a fast 7/8 time. Then I set aside 6 minutes for the SoundMakers improvisation.

I had spent the previous weeks slowly combing over the SoundMaker’s database, fishing for ear-grabbing sounds, ones that I could imagine create interesting textures with. In the end the pieces I decided to sample were: “Breathe” for orchestra by James Rolfe; “Time Zones” for marimba by Peter Hatch; “Hex” for percussion by Andrew Staniland; and lastly Kelly-Marie Murphy’s oboe concerto “Indelible Lines, Invisible Surface”.

I loaded all of the samples into Ableton Live 9 Suite (courtesy of Ableton – many thanks) and experimented with looping them in various combinations. With some minor pitch manipulation I moved them towards an E-minor tonality, so that I could also do some light chordal improvisation on the piano, and route the piano sound through effects in Ableton to create a nice, thick, sonic soup.

When I found combinations of samples that worked, I took screenshots of them, and during the  performance, I would quickly scroll to look through them, and then scroll back to trigger the next group of sound loops in Live, then go to the next screen shot, and so on, all the time interspersed with sparse piano, reverbs and delays. It worked out well as an ambient middle-movement, between the other more dramatic pieces. [Here is one of those screenshots]

I closed my set with “Uprising”, which is in a jazz/breakbeat piece in a blisteringly fast 10/8 – a fun and boisterous way to end.  I was delighted that the TSO lobby had filled up so quickly and the audience was so attentive throughout, following the music in every direction it went – I was also very happy that my older brother Chuck could attend, as he is now visiting from Brazil, and doesn’t get to see me perform very often.

To give you an idea what it sounded like, here is a recording of the Soundscape below, uploaded to my Soundcloud account.

The semi-improvised electronic soundscape contains orchestral samples from the SoundMakers database; samples from pieces by Andrew Staniland, Peter Hatch, Kelly-Marie Murphy and James Rolfe.

soundmakers.ca
www.soundstreams.ca

This improvised electronic soundscape contains orchestral samples from the SoundMakers database; samples from pieces by Andrew Staniland, Peter Hatch, Kelly-Marie Murphy and James Rolfe.

soundmakers.ca
www.soundstreams.ca

And I’m reminded of it again right now, as I’m on a train, leaving Berlin. I’m playing in Düsseldorf tomorrow evening in a private concert series (the owner asked me not to post the invitation because they are already at capacity), followed by a concert on Friday in Cologne at the 8th annual Ambient Festival in the Basilika St. Aposteln, then rushing back to Berlin the next day to play an improvised solo piano set at Sowieso in Neukölln.

some views from the train window from Berlin to Düsseldorf

I’m looking out the window and blissing out on the beautiful, snow-covered countryside rolling by, and noticed that I lucked out on a very full, but quiet train compartment. It is just like a concert setting – it just takes one person to disturb the whole fragile mixture and then everybody’s mindfulness and consideration is in vain. The train is not absolutely silent by any means, but I notice that the people that are talking, are doing so quietly, or at least one can tell they are trying to be mindful of other passengers. No one is “breaking the seam”, as such. When someone’s phone goes off, they answer it quickly. It’s one of those synchronicity things where a few hours manages to be blissful as there is not one inconsiderate, loud, blathering person to be found that would ruin the perfect broth of this one train compartment. Perhaps it’s that I had only a couple hours sleep last night, or maybe I’m developing some curmudgeonly tendencies as I get older, but I find that my concentration and creativity more and more is intertwined with the environment I’m in. When a group of people are in the same place and are all more or less on the same page, I find it to be so civilized, and musically speaking, beautiful things can happen.

A sympathetic audience can help an artist get to that zone much more easily, and allow special things to bloom. Not that it is impossible to achieve without it – sometimes adverse or even antagonistic settings can force an artist to focus even more, having no other option, and this intense pressure can create its own diamonds, but getting the mental leverage against it to make it work to your advantage can be like wrestling with an anaconda. In contrast, I remember that as recently as five years ago, no matter what the environment was, I could do a mental rhinoceros charge and achieve full concentration through any distractions, pretty consistently.

I recently went to watch a stand-up comedy night in Berlin, and was struck by how even a profession so different as live comedy could be so similar when it comes to a performer relating to an audience. One person sitting in the fourth row, talking to his girlfriend might be a source of distraction that could affect the performers concentration, and make the difference between the comedian being funny or not. I saw a YouTube video of Louis CK being heckled, where instead of him ignoring the heckler or trying to out duel them, he addressed it directly and ended up creating something even better and funnier out of this “new material” – because his whole schtick is so honest and self-depreciating, he could just openly state it was affecting his concentration and not worry about any magic being dispelled. But it’s just like watching any sports match – this could have unfolded in any countless number of ways as well.

Audience, group or crowd psychology, however it might be labelled, is a fascinating thing to contemplate, since it is such a ubiquitous parameter of what I do. Each person is an endlessly complex equation of emotions themeselves, and when you add more and more poeople together the audience dynamic is made exponentially more unfathomable, and hence all the more possibilities for the performers conducive atmosphere to be thrown off balance. Since creating art is a fine, delicate thing (it can be blunt and gigantic but even a nuclear explosion stems from minuteness of atoms – strange example, I know) I’ve come to appreciate more and more when the perfect storm of audience, location environment and performer confluence arises. I don’t mean to sound highfalutin by any means, but to me it is part of the definition of what it means to be civilized, in as far as my experience goes. Basically, it’s just so satisfying and affirming when people co-operate in this subtle way! Even if not consciously.

The Great Pyramid of Cholula was a monument that had been started
before the Aztecs arrived on the scene. Apparently each successive wave
of people had added to the structure so that over centuries it kept
getting larger and larger, and by the time of the conquistadors, it was
already the largest monument in the world (the Great Pyramid of Giza is
taller, but of less girth and volume), although mostly in a state of
neglect and buried largely under vegetation so that it appears more
like a very large hill. The pyramid had been dedicated to the worship
of the pantheon’s chief god, Quetzalquatl, serpent-god of the air (and
other things, depending on which source you’re getting it from…. my
erudite source is AD&D’s Deities and Demigods). The Spanish plopped
a church on top of the hill, but the front facade of the pyramid has
been mostly restored, and that’s where the concert was to be held.
According to Dubinski, under the Aztecs the altar saw humans sacrificed
quite frequently (about one every few weeks).

Some of you may remember the somewhat infamous story of what happened
to my Nord Synthesizer last fall in Toronto’s Nuit Blanche (a disgruntled
person attacked my equipment during my outdoor performance and flung
my Nord into a pool of mud, causing some damage and stunning the audience),
and since this is part of my music making I wanted to have one rented,
in addition to the sound system, mixer and grand piano they were going to provide.
It wasn’t available so I had to lug it all the way from Toronto in a hard case (this actually comes
into play later on).

On the day of the performance we were a bit worried about being rained
out, and it was a bit cloudy, but fortunately didn’t rain. I requested
to go to the location as early as possible to set up and make sure any
technical problems could be avoided. This ended up being slightly futile.
Around noon we started setting up. The stage that was assembled was huge,
way larger than was needed for me and my equipment, and seemingly very
unstable – I was worried the legs of the grand piano would puncture the floor
and after I played a loud chord would cause a disaster during the performance.
But just as I was getting started the audio-visual crew said they wanted to wrap up
and come back in a few hours. I felt that we should keep going and have a full sound-check
to make sure everything really works, but after a bit of a tug-of-war we disbanded.

When we came back later, only a few hours before the concert, the wind
was picking up. The two large projection screens that were being
assembled on either side of the stage were posing some difficulty, and
flapping a bit like sails on a ship. The piano was delivered and
thankfully was stable on the platform.  But now that the sound system was in place, I was really anxious to try my gear as soon as possible,
even while the piano was being tuned. I wanted to set up all the synth
sounds, but everytime I’d come back to the synth, it had re-set
itself, and I thought I was being forgetful. Finally I started playing some
bass sounds on it through the house speakers, but every time the bass
sounded, the synth would turn off and start re-booting. It turned out
that the power supply was very unstable since it was outdoors and out
of the downtown core, and they needed a regulator.

Meanwhile the wind was picking up more and more and it really seemed
that the screens, some 30 or 40 feet across, were going to blow away in
a potentially dangerous way. I mentioned a few times that some people
should be permanently stationed on either side of them to prevent this.
Surely enough, one of them blew over quite suddenly, and so they re-set
it, this time drawing metal wires to pegs in the ground to provide
support.

In the previous days we had made jokes that the gods may be pissed off
by our concert and cause rain on the day of, but oddly enough it was
quite dry, but suddenly very chilly and extremely windy. As the
audience started seating themselves, both screens looked extremely
flimsy. The piano was tuned and everything except for my Nord was
working smoothly. The audience seemed to me to be a mixture of Mexicans
from nearby and American tourists, both of which had probably seen the
many advertisements for our concert throughout Puebla. Somewhere
between 300 and 400 people ended up attending, filing up half of the
seats laid out in the field.

Checking my synth once again only 10 minutes before the show; it is now
turning off-and-on every 5 seconds, and Omar offered to try to get a
regulator for it, but it seemed pretty clear to me that this would
cause way too much panic and stress before playing and would cause the
audience to become restless, so I had to cut my losses and ditch the
Nord even though I had lugged its heavy ass all the way from T.O.

As for the screens,  I’m not sure if anyone was manning them or not,
but suddenly the one of the right of the stage blew violently over,
thankfully harming no-one but eliciting a gasp from the audience. They
started trying to re-assemble it but I put in my two-cents, saying
better to ditch that as well and just go with one screen than try
desperately to somehow get it up and secure again unsuccessfully in
front of the audience.

So we started the show with one screen, piano and laptop. At this point
the wind was blowing so violently that sometimes in the middle of the
music, the piano mics would distort and for some reason blare an
overwhelming bass tone that would over-rule my music for a few seconds.
The laptop screen was blown back so far that I could barely read it,
and was in danger of blowing into the insides of the piano. I was in
fear that the lighting rig behind my back would become airborne and
maim me as well. It was so cold up there, in between pieces I would rub
my hands together frantically to try to get some heat (this was
embarrassing as Puebla TV was on stage filming me while I was
shivering). I had to choose my notes carefully as my fingers were
getting stiff in the cold.

As I was watching the screen, every single person was on edge as the
wind played havoc with the screen and people were pulling on it like
manning the sails of a ship in a storm. At this point my musical
soundtrack was less following the image of a spiral galaxy and more
mirroring the concave-convex fluctuations of the screen, I was plucking
madly in the higher register as if something was about to pop, and
surely enough it did — the remaining screen went down with a thud, a
second gasp from the audience, and my music samples from my computer
are still looping, but I’m not playing the piano.

I stop the computer and for a few seconds no one has any idea what to
do. At that moment I’m the only thing that the audience can look at.
I repress all of my frustration and turn to them with a smile and say
‘Uno momento!’ which thankfully brought about some laughter and
dissipated the tension.

Dubinski, Omar and I quickly met backstage and it seemed useless to put
up the screen again when it would have to be untangled and would
probably blow over again. So they decided to project onto the pyramid
itself, onto one of the altars which was an upright stone slab weighing
several tonnes. Out of everyone there, only one person came and
demanded her money back. It was one of those wonderful situations when
the audience is completely on your side, and several hundred people
moved all of their seats in a very cooperative and organized fashion,
repositioning in front of the altar. We continued the concert from
where we left off, despite the wind keeping up and the occasional
distortions. At the end we were met with thunderous applause and calls
for an encore! This was a huge relief as at several points it seemed
like the show seemed completely sabotaged.

Somehow, in the end, all of these elements that were working against us
ended up bringing the us and the audience closer and they felt like
supporting us rather than storming out, making the end result somehow
even better than if everything had gone smoothly!

Here are some pictures of before and during the performance, taken by John Dubinski.

setting up on stage

the second giant screen that would come violently tumbling down

freezing and playing the piano

during the performance

performing on the Bass Piano at the exhibition “Speculative Brutalism” at Flutgraben Studios in Kreuzberg, Berlin

It is quite enjoyable to play; but I find one doesn’t simply play it as one would a normal piano. Virtuosic pieces, or even most repertoire, change harmony too quickly, as the tone is more murky, hollow or bulbous: the strings are very loose, and can even jangle and klang against one another in the lower registers if one plays too forcefully. So it lends itself much more to more gentle reverberant chords, as if you are “strumming” the tuning, or allowing arpeggiated harmonies and cavernous melodies to sound themselves at their own rate. I’m looking forward to playing it more extensively at the salon-exhibition this Friday at Flutgraben.

photos by Diana Artus

The event is called “SPECULATIVE BRUTALISM SPONTANEOUS SALON” and the artists featured are: Matthias Krause, Diane Artus and Sascha Mikloweit. Andrew Wedman and I will play alternating 30-minute sets on the Bass Piano.