Looking at the prevalent practice of collaboration in improvised music, it occurred to us, that in most occasions it culminated in ephemeral physical communion. With the present publication SEELE was aiming to disconnect the improvisational-compositional process from the actual act of playing and turn its sequence on its head. We venture out into a more impersonal habitat, coagulating machine automation and practices that support unconscious association of the material. The so established process felt closer to inhabiting a room of involuntary memories, exploring our minds chambers in contrast to the somatic experience of improvising as physical act.

 

For a long time manifestations of music have been constrained by industry standards of functionalism, consumer market expectations, and the makeup of its technical medium – e.g. restricted length or compositional approaches of songs and records. With the dawn of the digital revolution, consumption behaviour has changed entirely and the potential of the medium has exploded – the jailer has been reborn as saviour and like before, music inherited its proxies' qualities, becoming virtually free from its former shackles. The digital realm allows for a musical avatar that retains its ephemerality, that is not pinned down in a haunting, unfading recording.

 

Considering this we have built a room for our music, echoing its prior physical representations as well as methodically reminiscent of earlier attempts at transcending formats like the cut-up technique, which questioned exactly the power structures within systems we accept without questions, leading us down a preoccupied path of engaging and judging our environments. In this sense the designed mechanics of aleatoric assembly, executed by an algorithm, add an impersonal improvised factor to the equation, freeing it from internalised structures and their mechanisms of control, thus empowering an altered state of consciousness and perception that redefines the established creative process of an active creator and passive receiver towards a collaborative or even interpersonal reality.

 

SEELE 2021-01-21 21:21