In the brain of a non-procrastinator, the rational decision maker is in charge, but for someone like me, the instant gratification monkey is running the show whenever he gets the chance. In Eisenhower terms, I have quadrant 4 issues.
When I tried to place my studies in the matrix, I realised that Q2 matters were mostly theoretical parts of the project. There was no clearly defined practise, no real direction. This finally made it clear that, for the work I was doing at RMC to be truly relevant for myself and the programme, it needed to fall into the Quadrant 2 of non urgent importance.
I wanted to redefine the project in a way that would bring me into Q2 on a daily basis, so I started to tune in to different practises I had already tried, that seemed to be in line with this Open Mode. A number of practises appeared to have been in Q2. They pointed me in the direction of EoD.
Here’s a short description of a few experiments that gave me a sense of curiosity or wonder, inspiring the shape of the project.
First practise - Inverted guitar
The first real clue came on a day in a house in Småland, where I found myself in an open Q2-like mindset, playing the guitar and singing. In the middle of a session, I got an impulse to turn the guitar upside down. While my hands were awkwardly trying to make sense of this strange 6 stringed harp, my voice responded in an interesting way. It was clear to me that the activation of the left side of my body, picking the guitar with a lifted elbow, expanding the left part of the ribcage, was freeing ressources that immediately related to the voice. Where my focus would normally be on controlling both guitar and voice, the strangeness of this new situation created a physical and mental shift, manifesting in a sense of freedom of the voice. The melodies came out in a natural way, almost unaffected by the superego. It was a state which reminded me of experiences I used to encounter in deep meditation.
In this space, the voice felt like the energetic center, and there was a sense of great ressource, stemming from the invitation to my left side to be an active part of the creation. It was a rather mysterious feeling, which raised a number of questions for myself, though at this point wordless.
Second practise - Jakob Bro’s approach
Some years back, I took lessons with composer/guitarist Jakob Bro. He suggested I’d try this routine:
Half an hour - Contemplate what you would like to compose
5 minutes - Compose
I’ve done this a few times, and always finding it difficult. I tended to get locked out by the censor (or monkey) when trying to imagine the music. It seemed that I needed to make my own version of this for it to work for me. I find that I’m doing this now in EoD.
Third practise - 3 x 30 minutes drum and voice with fixed rules
In a continuous session of 3x30 minutes, I would constantly be hitting a drum in a slow pace, around 40 bpm. The first half hour, I would sing one note on top of that.The second half hour, I would sing two notes, a fifth interval. And the third half hour, I would set the voice free. The idea was to see the degree of attention to detail I would tune in to, when stripping away freedom and focusing on few elements, and to see what kind of improvisation would come out of tight control, shifting to complete freedom.
Working with these primitive elements felt correct, as I got quite deep into timbre, rhythm and body.
The first half hour, my voice gradually opened, and I was paying more and more attention to detail, mainly focusing on timbre.
The second half hour, I was exploring dynamics and glissandi, while bodily awareness increased and I found a neutral attitude. I was studying the ‘magnetism’ within the fifth interval.
When I let go of the voice in the third half hour, I jumped straight into irony without regard for aesthetics or continuity, singing nonsense. When I started improvising lyrics, it evoked a lot of emotion, which was awful. Gradually I got back to a more neutral and “real” place, while connecting with an agressive energy.
Fourth practise - inverted drums
I turned a drum set around, playing it for around 60 minutes while doing the following exercises:
- Playing as fast as possible with left foot on kick and left hand on floor tom, while singing Jeg ved en lærkerede
- Changing focus: outer, other, inner (stage presence exercise, described in Finn Hesselager chapter)
- playing in a grid and skipping beats
- Moving right arm in choreographed patterns while drumming with left side of the body
This last experiment was the most recent one, and I came out it with a sense of what my soloist project was going to be about. It was at this time I was reading about The Eisenhower Matrix, and I realised that for the 60 minutes of drumming and using the voice, I had been operating in Q2. New ideas were arriving in my mind while I was giving my left foot the power and responsibility of the kick pedal. While working with the drums and voice - as with the inverted guitar - I had experienced a sense of ressource far from my everyday working mode, and an experience of freedom I had been looking for.
Soon after, I wrote the new project description, and finally I was working in Q2.
A hole in time
A description of the first half of my education, where I laid the foundation for what became Eisenhower on Drums.
Why is this important? A good way to evaluate the first half of my soloist education.
Why is it urgent? It’s the part of the story that should be told right now.
Starting out the first week, Torben Snekkestad confronted me with a shuddering observation. In the way he saw me approach music, he sensed a strained and controlled attitude, lacking flexibility, headroom and freedom. I was startled to immediately realize that this was true, and even more so, that I had been almost blind to it. So, from day one it was clear that the project needed to be about freedom and control.
The way I saw my new situation as a post graduate student, I was given the opportunity to live out a juvenile fantasy of mine, of stopping time practising, fixing my issues and returning into the world to shine.
“Here it is!”, I thought. “This is my time hole, this is my chance to work from the root and up and become a more whole musician”.
I began to ponder how I would be able to construct a project that would deal with the whole of my creative being. Under the working title Voice the Unknown I tried to write a project description that would make every end of my life come together in an all-encompassing exploration of the spectrum between freedom and control. This was, naturally, futile. The whole reason for diving into the subject of freedom, was of course the lack of freedom; the lacking overview of my life situation. Constructing such a unifying project would require a much deeper understanding of my nervous system, motivations behind actions, mechanical habit structures, and more. Therefore, I ended up in a ouroboros situation, searching for a conceptual frame, only to find myself back in square one every day. I couldn’t possibly zoom out far enough to make sense of freedom and control.
Meanwhile, what I did realize was that a primary source of my need for control was a sense of inadequacy, particularly related to my voice. This, of course, relates to the experience I had in my early teens. I realised that the voice was the weakest point in my creative confidence, the least free aspect of my musical endeavours. Thinking about it, this had been quite obvious for years. Every time I tried to sing, my face would contort, turn red and ache from the straining of every muscle of my neck and shoulders. But now, finally, I understood that I should work from the body, voice and out, and I defined a project called Voice Mode.
I started working with the theatre voice teacher Nini Matessi Schow, analysing my unconscious habits in speaking, and working to strengthen clarity, articulation and voice projection through a daily practise of a number of exercises.
Simultaneously, I started taking lessons in the renowned voice technique Speech Level Singing, developed by Seth Riggs, the voice coach of Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and many others. Speech Level Singing is a pragmatic and mechanical approach to the act of singing, with the philosophy that the feeling is inherent in the singer, and the neutral approach to the voice, making it more free, will enable the feeling and message of the song in an effortless way.
These approaches immediately clashed with my own semi-conscious self-image as a sensitive artist, whose message is inherent in the feeling. With a philosophy along the lines of, ”if it’s felt strongly, it will come across.” This clash of approaches was hard to work through, and my ego was very resistent, especially of the apparent insensitivity of the Speech Level Singing. In these lessons I was encouraged by my teacher to sing playful, energetic pop songs, and move away from the self-absorbed, contemplative energy of my own songwriting. This was a painful proces of opening up to what I at the time considered to be a more superficial energy. Actually, it was a lowering of my self protective walls, and a crucial part of the process of freeing the voice.
A liberating aspect of the Speech Level Singing is that the exercises sound terrible.
After a few lessons, I started getting used to this, allowing myself to sound ridiculous. This was poison for my superego, which offered me intense resistance. At the time, I was practising in my collective, an old house with thin walls. Every one of my 18 housemates could hear me howling and barking in my room, and it turned out that terrorising my friends in this way was healthy for me. This time there was no doubt about the awfulness, no reason for embarrassment, and they only made fun of me in kind ways.
While working with these techniques, I took the challenge from Torben Snekkestad to set up a number of trial and error concerts, as another way of challenging perfectionism, and opening up to freer musical action. I played a number of uncomfortable concerts at cafés and open mics, to challenge my snobbishness. Here, I got insight into playing for audiences with no expectations, and experiences of failure related to closed energy and excessive control.
A surprising moment was during a solo concert at a treatment center for people with mental illnesses. The response was a blend of great enthusiasm and absolute indifference, and among other requests, a young man asked me to play the Metallica song Nothing Else Matters. Interestingly, in that room, where normal was not around, it felt natural to channel a James Hetfield type energy, spontaneously remembering most of the lyrics and guitar parts of the song, although my Metallica days are some 20 years behind me. The young man was satisfied, and I felt free.
The opposite scene took place at the open mic session at Tjili Pop. I was playing my own material, trying to put all my energy into it, trying to break out of my shell, and it was all wasted. People looked at me with dead eyes, seeming annoyed to have emotion spilled out over them. I caught the eye of a bright looking young man sitting right in front of me. With his look, he said: “...Why!?” This might very well be my own projection, but in any case, it was a low point. Painfully, but also interestingly low.
Another confrontation with my closedness was offered by the theatre guru Finn Hesselager, whose mask workshop we attended with my class in the fall of 2016. Hesselager is precise and direct in his feedback and observations regarding energy, and while extremely inspiring, the critique was also hardcore, in the light of my ability to open up and project my energy outwards. I decided to return to work deeper with Finn, going there another two times in the following years. I discuss aspects this work in the Finn Hesselager chapter in Q4.
In may 2017, Kresten Osgood invited me to be artist in residence at Mandagsklubben at the venue 5E. Mandagsklubben is a club for improvised and experimental music, and I decided to challenge myself with playing my ØYA material with a new lineup for 5 concerts.
I played one solo concert, a concert for 6 guitars, a traditional rock/jazz lineup, a chamber-type band with string quartet, and a conceptual time-travel concert featuring lots of guests and reuniting for the first time in 20 years with my childhood band Ida og Drengene.
I believe in rituals as a way of closing and opening chapters of life, and I used the residency at 5E as a ritual of cleaning my slate with regards to playing the ØYA music live. After the concert series, I drew from the experience of playing with so many different musicians, in assembling a fixed live trio.
Through all these concerts, I learned that the energy is often most direct and free when I’m playing solo, or with a smaller group of musicians. Sometimes, in larger groups (the ØYA lineup has often been 10 people or more) I have enjoyed the grandness, but also experienced that my need of control becomes too dominant. Playing solo, I could stretch out parts as I wished, have more extreme dynamics, and have a setlist improvising my way from song to song in no specific order. I the light of this, ØYA is now a trio with the bassist Jeppe Skovbakke and drummer Anders Vestergaard. The energy is getting more and more free and there’s never any doubt about where the music goes when we are three. It’s a very direct energy-triangle.
During the 5E concerts I had my first episodes of burning out, becoming much too stressed. This was the beginning of the first of two dark periods, which influenced my ability to work, showing me hard truths about my own mental health, thereby pointing me in the direction of the EoD project. This subject is covered in more detail in the Q2 section.
It was around this time, through my efforts to release stress, that I learned about the Eisenhower Matrix on the helpful Wait But Why blog. With some reluctance, I had to admit that I was having trouble with procrastination, which in Wait But Why terms means, I had trouble with the instant gratification monkey.
