After thinking about the various facets of the ideas I have been having about this unit and project, I was trying to decide how best to execute a creative sound piece that would include all of the various ideas and points I am trying to make with this unit.
Part of the inspiration behind the original idea of the piece, was a moment where I had shown my father a piece of music I had made that I had somehow managed to make in a time signature that even I could not understand, yet that felt very natural to me and with the rhythm this piece had, I felt that it flowed organically and naturally without feeling off to me. However when I showed this piece to my father he didn’t like the fact that he didn’t know where the beat was landing, and this threw him off enjoying the listening as he was stuck on the idea of not understanding it, or it not being how his brain felt it expected it to be.
I came upon the realisation that the ways that we all experience everything is literally incomprehensibly different, based on the effect that our previous experiences in life have on shaping our views/ perceptions of the world around us. I feel that this is particularly prominent when experiencing art, as it is often so personal, and also often an abstract or non-literal meaning bestowed upon it, therefore leaving a lot of space for interpretation or varied readings.
This made me think deeply about how differently my listening (and thoughts on a piece of music) must be from my fathers for us to experience this same music very differently. This same idea exists between all people because all of our experiences are so different. This presents an interesting dynamic in the context of jazz, especially avant-garde free-jazz which may defy many rules/ conventions and expectations of music. Upon speaking to my father about free-jazz he spoke about my uncle, who although is heavily interested and appreciative of jazz music, is not even a fan of free-jazz. But this again would be because of exactly the experiences and perceptions he has had around him in his life up till this point, and perhaps given the differences in German culture this may have had significant impact upon him and his understanding/ reading of music.
All of this culminated into an idea for this essay as I started to think about how I could draw from many of these ideas of bringing together conventions and lack thereof, bring together something that may be a cultural reference but juxtaposed with something that may not.
The piece I created is a 13 minute improvised, one-take composition made using a saxophone and my sp-404 sampler. I had previously created various ambient soundscape pieces using the sp404 using resampling, and I had these pieces loaded on the sp, so I played one of these pieces with a lot of delay and let it play out as I started to improvise on the saxophone, I then brought in other samples that I had on the sp such as various drum breaks (reminiscent of drum breaks that would have been heavily used in 80’s/90’s hip hop) and other sounds that I had on the sp. I managed to go between playing the saxophone and triggering/ manipulating the samples relatively well and seamlessly, which was important as I didn’t want to piece to feel separated or going from one to the other, rather for it to seem like it was at least 2 people performing.
I had the idea to release this piece and title it under the name ‘David R. Hawkins’, and claim that this person was a new signing on the label I help to run called ‘Everything is Perfect Records’. This is because the lecturer/ philosopher David R. Hawkins had a talk/ video called Everything is Perfect, which I had found by accident on YouTube, and which perfectly aligned with our meaning behind the name of the record label, and its deeper meaning in our lives.