Almost a project unto itself, my work with my group Bastard Assignments should be understood as a trajectory and read as one. The pieces and projects advance from left to right.
My colleague Caitlin Rowley and I have presentated papers in UK and Belgium on how we each work with the group, how we describe it, and how we name the shared spaces that show up. I will reference this work in this section.
Bit about bastards album and I brought these bottles with no intention. But perhaps key moment
In 2018, a the beginning of this programme, I went to Snape Maltings with Bastard Assignments to record our debut album.
Making an album seems like a strange idea when the reader understands the nature of the rest of our body of work in that our work is more than music, it takes in movement, theatre, the visual. So limiting ourselves to simply an audio format was a challenge however we were still able to translate our experimental attitude to this situation.
We recorded some existing works, like EDGE and Hold and Give/take and Tim's stuff. My contributions were slightly more experimental and less formed. My approach more collaborative than the others. They were to be less a recording of a live performance, more of a composition of sonic elements that were not performed at the same time. This would mean the process was such that the finished audio work would be experienced in an abstract non-place, no stage, just in the ear, no band, just sounds with some sources recognisable, others not and sometimes impossible.
I knew that I wanted to make something with the prepared brass instruments and wasn't sure or even attached to a way to make it. This would become a piece called PREP and has its own section later on in this page.
I brought a good deal of junk, particularly metal buckets, beaters, tubs, a wok, the prepared brass instruments, and a selection of small glass jars. Again I had no idea for them. In fact Tim and Ed both requested to use them for sounds in their own pieces to great effect.
Towards the end of our week at Snape Maltings, the four of us decided to create some crashing noise sound together, in front of four mics.
It is sad that I don't have the documentation of what followed so this account is to the best of my memory.
We were in flow and were exploring the objects that I had brought. We each took a glass jar, like the one seen above, and a beater. Then explored the ways to hit it and then modulate the sound and then becoming dextrous and fluid with those parameters. This happens very quickly.
We then asked Jamie to begin recording and suggested playing a fast pulse with a slowly dropping pitch in unison. The pitch would shift down as the hand holding it slowly closed around the open end of the jar. The pitch could then jump back up by removing the closed hand fingers as if resetting to the start position, all the while hitting the base of the jar with the beater in the other hand. We managed to do this by Tim conducting, or at least sniffing or moving to indicate when to change. Our musicality and experience playing together also made this possible.
These suggestions were not made by me, in fact I attribute this piece of audio to Ed as I remember it was led by him. It must also be noted that a lot of Ed's output and his pieces that we were recording that week were heavily pulsed based and demanded playing pulses in time with each other for long durations. So it might be expected that this parameter for forgrounded and allowed to entire the space.
We did two or three takes of this and I was extremely impressed with the quality of the sound and the simplicity yet musicality of the idea.
I wasn't sure how I'd use this yet, in fact I was happy to present it on its own, as a stand alone track. I was pursuing an idea combining the prepared brass with some material I'd brough made from music I'd made transferred to CD then forced it to skip, like CDs do, by sticking small pieces of tape to the CD and recording the result.
Here is what I was trying to do.
In fact I use this piece of song on the EP I make with my brothers.
FEED is a sixteen minute dance-theatre piece for audio and projected video and the four of us moving on stage.
It feels like the culmination of our residency and my development at Snape Maltings. It is a successor of a series of pieces I made including Extended Play, AV, and Tro//ing. Each share a language of mime, lipsync, looping, and vague archness.
I began work on this piece around Christmas 2018 with the view to going to work with the group in Spring 2019. The "with" is significant. I remember clearly sculpting certain sections of material, pushing them along, with clear ideas of how they will appear in the finished piece. Alongside these were sections of material that, for example, had a sonic identity without any choreography yet, or were even more vague still. These were sections that I was planning on bringing and asking the group to actually devise.
I have several anecdotes about this stage in the process and upon reflecting, I discovered at least three key advantages to working in this way. This way being a method that could be descirbed as devising. Now follows brief accounts of the making process in detail for various sections of FEED. They occur in chronological order, as best as I can recall.
Building car story
Muybridge
Werewolves
Structure
Pite statement
Silent night
Car
Slo=mo
To put this in simple terms of this trajectory, with FEED, I alotted sections of the piece, ahead of time, time with bastard assignments, to be made with and by the group, the group that would be performing the work. I handed over periods of time to them, to make decisions and create within. To allow them to be creative and do what they are skilled at.
This leads me onto the key advantages of working in this way and it was working with the group through this process that I was able to so clearly articulate them:
1. The material was created much quicker, at least four times quicker than if I were just making it alone.
2. My colleagues were able to memorise the material almost immediately compared to if I simply dictated to them what to do. This makes total sense of course.
3. It just looked better in the body because it was their bodies from which is came.
4. We could give immediate feedback on each other because we were right there, in the room. (A perhaps sub-advantage but an advantage nonetheless.) maybe actually very important
This is not exhaustive and I am still open to finding more. It should be noted that these are advantages to working in a devising situation rather than composing in isolation as is conventional institutional instruction in how to compose.
A year after identifying these advatnges, I read GROUP FLOW by Sawyer and it was not surprising to see that he too has identified conditions for group flow that speak to the points I made above.
Sawyer quotes
What worked so well in the process of FEED was I was able to hone my role to set clear tasks with the view of a an attainable result that was defined in outline, in some parametres like duration and density, but free enough for the others to be creative.
This put the group into Flow, where the difficulty of the task matched the group's ability to do the task.
another advantage something about looking better, easier to transfer to someone else, something I forgot but thought about last night
PREP is an improvised piece to be played on viola and the prepared brass instruments that I brought and have had for years.
We initially put an improvisation of these instruments on our album
Then we decided to perform the piece as part of our Aldeburgh Festival programme in June 2019.
We spent a lot of time rehearsing this improvisation on residency at Snape Maltings. I added an audio part.
I was discussing this piece and what we would do for it with Ed en route back from performing in Manchester in April 2019. I asked him what it was, the piece, and he said that I had composed the instruments. This struck me. I was beginning to use the group in a variety of ways.
Where as in FEED, I was using leaving sections of the piece to the group to devise when we were together, for PREP, I brought the instruments.
I had no idea for what the shape of the piece should be, what it should sound like, or how I want it to be. Instead I was confident that the group would take what I was giving and indeed, as can be heard in the documentation below, taking ownership of the piece. Taking ownership is an expression that comes up a lot with my work with Bastard Assignments.
To reflect on this further, this conversation almost certainly encompasses performance practice, as can be seen with my project with John Moran.
As composer-performers, it may be a given that the practice is reflexive whereby the composing informs the performing, the performance practice is indistinguishable from the act of composition.
Of course, to say the piece is improvised is to sell it short. We spent a lot of time preparing and rehearsing as well as simply practicing playing the instruments in order to understand how they speak. Viola aside, these are not standard instruments with rational tuning or temperament in the same way a flute or marimba are. And Caitlin, at that time, would not have made any claim to play the Viola with any great technique. We had to learn the instruments and learn how they worked for us. They are really very limited.
We presented PREP as a piece, that is, a work of fixed duration and instrumentation, reproducable in a sense. This wasn't really how it fealt to perform because of the precarious nature of the instruments and that it was very loosely organised. To say improvised seems wrong; a defining feature of improvisation is that it occurs without preparation. We prepared a lot for this performance.
We didn't tell our audience that we were not playing specific pitches or to a beat or that we were listening to each other more than anything else. Instead we told them that this piece is authored by the group which in a way over-simplifies the process yet within the context of Aldeburgh Festival this seemed justified. Using the instruments and their limitations as inspiration in combination with our shared tacit knowledge and experience of each other, we performed a version of our playing together.
And yet in this excerpt it is clear that authorship is present in a conventional way; Ed began to write a score. It may seem grandiose to descirbe a diagram as a score to describe a simple shape across time. The shape conveyed information about density and volume mostly and not much else, it was even incomplete, but in the paradigm of composed music, it was a score.
(don't forget that I asked Francesco to choreograph)
Third iteration of this and came more prepared than ever to smash it up
Largely Ed I think
I felt bad about snubbing Tim wanting to bring in ideas from later into the earlier section however this was something I knew to be right, this is an option of the originator, to veto things and to make the decision on what to to or what will remain
Made the pre-section, based a bit on Lea Anderson, points of body and quite 3d
Jammed the middle then Ed suggested a change, a counterpoint, like smoking a cigarette
Added the cigarette to break the concept
Added the footsteps which are problematic because I added them and saw that problem coming
This was started in September 2018 to just focus on this material, we worked to make the phonebooth and posture our own individual styles to suit the body of the performers
In London in 2019 we went out to orientate ourselves to actual phonebooths, taking what I know about intimacy from making 360 video and that it must be part of process for it to be visible
Ahmed bit about materiality and orientation
Stress again that if you want the phonebooth to be a real feeling then it must be 3d and have informed the process. Citing Threnody for the victims of hiroshima as a hollow and perhaps offensive title because of the hollowness of it. It does not in any way link itself to Hiroshima, because that did not feature in the process, instead the only thing that it articulates is the act of composition itself.
There was an amount of leeway that we each had that was articulated in various ways, particularly through what pose we took whilst the phone rang, and the quality of our actions that was largely individual. Of course the whole thing is a unison so there has to be some fundamental similarities in everything we did. Ed has to bring his phone lower than the rest of us, Caitlin had to raise hers a bit to a slightly less natural position in order to put the phones at roughyl the same level. This is what I mean about making the part fit the performer, or at least allowing and encouraging or arriving at the group's decision to change the action to suit the performer’s body.
Caitlin often got hung up on details about where the road is and shouldn’t there be a step down from the phonebooth onto the sidewalk and that level of realism isn’t that interesting for us.
We will work on this again with Oli in November. This in a way links this project to the one in the future with Alan Fielden.
Graph of all the changes made.
Got Oli, Oli likes BOY STORY, I mentioned Karaoke, also AI writing
Suggested Peter and Mimi
He then suggested Alan
To work with bastards
We spoke
We shared ideas, Alan had ideas
We began planning
Caitlin had copyright issues
PACT app in 18/12/19
Ed says why don’t we write the songs
Ed shared that talking heads video where they build the band
Can make a lego 3d model and description of creative acreage using real life examples and colours to create a block
Do I need to make a slack page for the others to chip in ideas?
Snape application done - hammering down karaoke nature
Alan came up with animal idea
Dramatikkens Hus?
Alan wrote a synopsis in March
Oli says is theatre is somewhere people come to see something and karaoke is somewhere people come to perform, then the audience must be prepared to come and perform or be part of it
Snape Maltings is shortlisted
As part of zoomjams, tried to get an application together to work digitally with the planned cast but this didn't happen because group didn't seem to get behind it. I felt bad about this and it put strain on group but this is expected as it's tough times.