Theory of Praxis

Theory of praxis
See also: “Solo Meta-Performance Practice” [FOARM #5]
What do you do when you improvise? Capture your internal process. A theory of your own practice.

Keywords: moment, memory, time, index, phenomenology, attention, listening


While improvising, I see before me a range of possible responses (in the form of sonic events: notes, sounds, figures, silence) to the music going on at any given moment. The range of responses may be wide or narrow. These responses fall roughly into categories or genres: Tried-and-True, Worn Out (formerly Tried-and-True), Verboten, and a final category of sounds/reactions that are as yet Untried or Unknown - sounds I haven't made before and might make “by accident” if I set myself up for it. Also, Worn-Out has a subcategory of the Recycling Bin - responses that I might be able to revive. The Recycling Bin has two outputs - a “Relistener,” which attempts to recontextualize Worn-Out events; and an “Accident Maker,” a means of creating new events from old through controlled experimentation. As shown on the chart, I only choose from the first and last categories or from the Recycling Bin (by way of the Relistener).

How do the aforementioned “Accidents” come from? It comes from a sensorimotor understanding of the instrument or medium, a conscious awareness of outer limits of your skills, and attempting to push outside those limits, or between the cracks of those limits, but in a controlled way - stepping just outside, or making a certain delicate unknown hybrid of better-known techniques. It’s a technique analogous to leaning close to a certain small, curious sound, and trying to hear it for itself. If you can hear your own sounds acousmatically, you can free them from perceived physical limitations and pursue them as sounds. Your pre-conscious can make bodily adjustments in response to this acousmatic imagination (which is simultaneously listening to the sounds in the immediate past and projecting an imagined new sound into the immediate future) to realize the new sounds before your conscious mind realizes it – hence the feeling of surprise that can result from one’s own playing. This feeling of surprise is often misread as randomness when in fact the process is more akin to an investigation of environmental or sensory phenomena.


Graph of the Choosing Mechanism







Performance-time
An aesthetic experience or practice is a “performance” if it has a moment of threshold-crossing when people (audience and artists) realize they are in a special-time(+special-space = performance time).

It’s not the same threshold you cross when you suddenly have a personal rapport with a painting, though it can be similar. Usually this special-time has duration, or invites duration (cf James Turrell). Looking at a painting can have any duration; with Turrell, you still have to walk in and out, and it envelops you; it’s impossible to miss, you have to voluntarily be part of it. You can stumble upon a painting. You don’t stumble upon Feldman or the BSC. Even walking past an outdoor performance, you don’t stumble upon sound and light – it stumbles upon you.

The crossing of the threshold into special-time (performance time) can be a surprise (cf Meta-Performance) or it can be fully anticipated. The threshold is there to evoke heightened attentiveness. The threshold can be physical (walking through a doorway); temporal (starting relatively on time); announced; by consensus (least effective); pressing play; etc.

John Candy

Saw the end of "Who is Harry Crumb?" and it reminded me how much a like John Candy. He was often referred to as the nicest man in show business. His characters were always likeable, very often having an "uncle" quality to them (including one actual uncle, "Uncle Buck"). "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" is one of the best structured comedies ever to come out of the unique comic-cinema landscape of the 80s.
IMDb entry

Mooninites vs. the Boston PD

A viral marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force gets Boston to spend $500,000 in emergency funds.

story here



and a video of the "bombs" being planted:

link

Alice Coltrane 1937-2007

Alice Coltrane, 69; performer, composer of jazz and New Age music; spiritual leader
By Jon Thurber, L.A. Times Staff Writer
January 14, 2007

Alice Coltrane, the jazz performer and composer who was inextricably linked with the adventurous musical improvisations of her late husband, legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, has died. She was 69.

Coltrane died Friday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center in West Hills, according to an announcement from the family's publicist. She had been in frail health for some time and died of respiratory failure.

Though known to many for her contributions to jazz and early New Age music, Coltrane, a convert to Hinduism, was also a significant spiritual leader and founded the Vedantic Center, a spiritual commune now located in Agoura Hills. A guru of growing repute, she also served as the swami of the San Fernando Valley's first Hindu temple, in Chatsworth.

For much of the last nearly 40 years, she was also the keeper of her husband's musical legacy, managing his archive and estate. Her husband, one of the pivotal figures in the history of jazz, died of liver disease July 17, 1967, at the age of 40.

A pianist and organist, Alice Coltrane was noted for her astral compositions and for bringing the harp onto the jazz bandstand. Her last performances came in the fall, when she participated in an abbreviated tour that included stops in New York and San Francisco, playing with her saxophonist son, Ravi.

She was born Alice McLeod in Detroit on Aug. 27, 1937, into a family with deep musical roots. Anna, her mother, sang and played piano in the Baptist church choir. Alice's half brother Ernie Farrow was a bassist who played professionally with groups led by saxophonist Yusef Lateef and vibes player Terry Gibbs.

Alice began her musical education at age 7, learning classical piano. Her early musical career included performances in church groups as well as in top-flight jazz ensembles led by Lateef, guitarist Kenny Burrell and saxophonist Lucky Thompson.

After studying jazz piano briefly in Paris, she moved to New York and joined Gibbs' quartet.

"As fascinating — and influential — as her later music was, it tended to obscure the fact that she had started out as a solid, bebop-oriented pianist," critic Don Heckman told The Times on Saturday. "I remember hearing, and jamming with, her in the early '60s at photographer W. Eugene Smith's loft in Manhattan. At that time she played with a brisk, rhythmic style immediately reminiscent of Bud Powell.

"Like a few other people who'd heard her either at the loft or during her early '60s gigs with Terry Gibbs, I kept hoping she'd take at least one more foray into the bebop style she played so well," he said.

She met her future husband in 1963 while playing an engagement with Gibbs' group at Birdland in New York City.

"He saw something in her that was beautiful," Gibbs, who has often taken credit for introducing the two, told The Times on Saturday. "They were both very shy in a way. It was beautiful to see them fall in love."

Gibbs called her "the nicest person I ever worked with. She was a real lady."

She left Gibbs' band to marry Coltrane and began performing with his band in the mid-1960s, replacing pianist McCoy Tyner. She developed a style noted for its power and freedom and played tour dates with Coltrane's group in San Francisco, New York and Tokyo.

She would say her husband's musical impact was enormous.

"John showed me how to play fully," she told interviewer Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin in comments published in "The Black Giants."

"In other words, he'd teach me not to stay in one spot and play in one chord pattern. 'Branch out, open up … play your instrument entirely.' … John not only taught me how to explore, but to play thoroughly and completely."

After his death, she devoted herself to raising their children. Musically, she continued to play within his creative vision, surrounding herself with such like-minded performers as saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson.

Early albums under her name, including "A Monastic Trio," and "Ptah the El Daoud," were greeted with critical praise for her compositions and playing. "Ptah the El Daoud" featured her sweeping harp flourishes, a sound not commonly heard in jazz recordings. Her last recording, "Translinear Light," came in 2004. It was her first jazz album in 26 years.

Through the 1970s, she continued to explore Eastern religions, traveling to India to study with Swami Satchidananda, the founder of the Integral Yoga Institute.

Upon her return she started a store-front ashram in San Francisco but soon moved it to Woodland Hills in 1975. Located in the Santa Monica Mountains since the early 1980s, the ashram is a 48-acre compound where devotees concentrate on prayer and meditation.

Known within her religious community by her Sanskrit name, Turiyasangitananda, Coltrane focused for much of the last 25 years on composing and recording devotional music such as Hindu chants, hymns and melodies for meditation. She also wrote books, including "Monumental Ethernal," a kind of spiritual biography, and "Endless Wisdom," which she once told a Times reporter contained hundreds of scriptures divinely revealed to her.

In 2001 she helped found the John Coltrane Foundation to encourage jazz performances and award scholarships to young musicians.

In addition to Ravi, she is survived by another son, Oren, who plays guitar and alto sax; a daughter, Michelle, who is a singer; and five grandchildren. Her son John Coltrane Jr. died in an automobile accident in 1982.

Listening journal - Christmas Eve 2006

I attached my binaural mics to my glasses and walked up Nutmeg Lane behind Linda's mother's house, through a large development of McMansions. I spend a considerable amount of time at several locations, including a stand of trees and a bridge over a stream, before realizing that my Edirol R-09 had become switched off in the bag 20 seconds after I started it. The thought had in fact occurred to me some minutes earlier, the sneaking suspicion that maybe the recorder wasn't on, but I decided I wouldn't check. In spite of the missed recordings, I'm glad I didn't check - I did a significant amount of attentive listening with the idea in mind that I was recording. Funny how much that helped me focus; kind of a placebo effect.

Nonetheless, when I finally did discover the mistake and turned the recorder back on, with the hold switch on this time (but not before stepping in some dogshit, dammit), I found I was less focused for that recording. Perhaps it was because I felt this obligation to revisit the soundmarks, like doing a second take while knowing that the missed first take would have been just fine. I was not "into it" as much and not very focused, until I got back to the beginning of Nutmeg lane and found a suddenly very productive spot. On the corner I found myself standing among several obliquely moving sound fields: Cars driving downhill from the faraway 11 o'clock to nearby 3 o'clock, and past me; very delicate scratchings of dead leaves touching the branches that still held them, above my head a slightly behind me at 8 o'clock; And a dog barking at the faraway 2 o'clock. The dog's bark was medium-low pitched but contained a lot of raspy upper partials; he got an instant slapback echo coming from the faraway 10 o'clock, which lacked the upper partials and came across with much more lower freq reverberance, sounding like a second, larger dog.

I then walked around their backyard and got a closeup of the dryer vent, and more closeup cars whipping by. Looking forward to hearing these recordings back.

DOD Equalizer

Z. Vex Woolly Mammoth

Danelectro Practice Amp (tabletop size)

Contrabass bridge with piezo pickup

Homemade piezo contact microphone

Detail from power input - ROLLS test oscillator

Frequency potentiometer, ROLLS test oscillator

Waveform selector, unnamed scientific test oscillator

Small brush made from speaker cable

installation sketches

These sketches are related to a multimedia installation I'm developing for the first semester Rensellaer Electronic Arts MFA show, and to another installation I'm planning further down the line, which will be a collaboration with porcelainist Linda Aubry. I'm going to be sticking speakers and microphones into porcelain pieces. Whee! (That's roughly what they'll sound like as they feed back.)