Live Solo Performance (extract) at RacketX (Miss Libertine’s,Melbourne) May 5th 2011

This is an extract of a live solo performance at Miss Libertine’s on 5th May 2011.
The performance highlights my current strategies for improvising with electroacoustic material.
This piece involved the manipulation of blocks of prerecorded material, modulation of frequencies with analog and digital electronics and using real time computer processing on my trombone.

k&m with Marcia Jane

k&m performing live with video artist Marcia Jane at The Toff, Melbourne November 2010

 Marcia Jane on Vimeo.

Jazz Construction #2

Recently I received an email from someone asking about the process behind this composition, which prompted me to try and articulate a reply.
Here’s my reply:

This piece is my attempt to -for wont of a better word- reconcile certain conflicting interests/approaches from the last 20 years of my writing/playing music.
Primarily my simultaneous interest in free jazz/improvisation and methodically structured composition.
It’s also an homage to a period in jazz that has shaped much of my work, what is referred to as “free jazz”, for me exemplified by the work of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Albert Ayler, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, the AACM, Anthony Braxton and so on.
But it is also a comment on my instrumental technique -or lack of- and my ongoing struggle to work either intuitively within very methodically engineered structures or intuitively structuring methodically constructed, prerecorded material.
With this in mind, Jazz Construction is an electroacoustic work entirely constructed in the studio.

Basically I played and recorded each instrument -various percussion,soprano saxophone,trumpet,flugelhorn and flute- with no preconceived notion as far as musical material.
All these parts where recorded close miked and as dry as possible so that I could freely place them within the stereo field.
They where then dissected in the studio, which allowed the recorded material to become a series of isolated jazz gestures which could then suggest possible ways of structuring into a composition.
In other words I wanted the intuitive recordings to dictate much of the structuring of the piece.
This idea came to me after reading an interview with Parmegiani, where he talked about trying not to have any preconceived idea as to how a piece would be composed, but rather allow the material itself to suggest a compositional path.
In this way I allowed my intuitive impulses to suggest a way to construct a methodically structured work .

Synthesizer Improvisation #5 (Roland System 100)

A solo improvisation using the Roland System 100 synthesizer.

k&m live at R3

My (along with Phoebe Faulkner) duo k&m performing live at Miss Libertine’s in Melbourne.

Parody Finds Itself Without A Vocation

An electroacoustic work completed in 2010.