I've rediscovered orange soda. When I
was a kid, that was the thing: orange soda. And root beer, and
grape soda. They tasted good, they tickled your tongue and your
nose, and all the other kids loved them too, because they were fun to
drink. Oh, I like a good cola once in a while, and I really enjoy
ginger ale (occasionally with a splash of tonic water), but orange
soda tastes like...playtime, and I like that a lot.
So I have a couple of new projects that
I'm getting under way and about which I'm pretty excited.
One of the projects is my birthday
present to myself, so I'm not going to talk about that until April.
The
other one is something I've been wanting to do for a long time: a
Cheap Guitar Club (and Junk Band). The idea is that you get together
with a bunch of other cats once or twice a month with your cheapest,
weirdest, quirkiest guitars (and whatever other toy instruments,
home-made instruments, or found-object noise makers you have), and
you make music. Now, most of your cheap guitar clubs (no caps—that
means “generic”) get together and play play old rock and roll
tunes or blues tunes or show tunes (probably somebody does that), and
that's not a bad thing, but we've decided to go off campus entirely
and make music that's entirely improvised. No songs, no I IV V
blues/rock jams, no “rehearsing”, just some nice lads gathering
to show off our wacky bottom-feeder instruments and make music that's
about sounds and textures and grooves and experimentation. And so
far, the sessions we've had have been great fun.
Not
everything works, and it's a little too easy to be self-indulgent
about a pet sound or pattern or riff you may have found, but
something always happens
and it's always fun.
We've just had four people for the first couple of jams, but I'm
hoping to gather a little larger crew for the next time and see what
happens. What I love about this process is no time is spent trying
to teach (or learn) that complicated song or chord sequence, and
“chops” are irrelevant—if you can make a sound and you can
listen, you can contribute. It's very democratic, and even the more
cacophonous jams have some nuggets of beauty. We've found some
jazzity grooves, some funkity grooves and some completely atonal bits
that would make John Cage proud.
There
are some refinements I'd like to see, such as a bit more emphasis on
the “junk band” aspect (that said, when you've got a room full of
cheap, quirky guitars and goofy, crappy little amps, it's hard to
want to pick up that pill bottle maraca or the silverware
xylophone—which I keep telling myself I need to build), and, with
several more people expected to join the mix, we'll need to become
better listeners and allow more space between the notes, but my
original concept of a “chamber ensemble” comprised entirely of
musicians playing cheap guitars and found objects, and performing
only improvised music appears to be a sound one.
Another
great aspect about this concept—aside from the music itself—is
the visual and theatrical esthetic of people making wonderful, weird
music on...well...junk. And socially, it's just stupid good fun to
crow proudly over an insanely cool (or coolly insane) piece of gear
that cost next to nothing and makes terribly sweet (or sweetly
terrible) sounds. We plan nothing. We rehearse nothing. We show
up, we show off our goofy gear, we make music, and we go home.
I'm
excited about the social aspect. I'm excited about the experimental
aspect. I'm excited about the prospect of building my own
sound-generating devices and making outrageous music with them. I'm
excited about working with people who are interested in making music
outside of the conventional idioms of western middle-class neo-tribal
dance music and then finding new and exciting ways of exploring those
very idioms. I can't wait to take it out in public. Stay tuned.
In the
mean time, I encourage you (if you're not already doing it) to
experiment with sound. Pop open a can of orange soda and start
banging on a pan, or plucking the spokes of a bicycle wheel, or
building an atonal marimba out of 2x4's, or become a wind-chime
virtuoso. It's fun.
I also
encourage you (if you haven't already done so) to expand your musical
lexicon:
I encourage you to listen to the music
of John Cage.
I encourage you to listen to the music
of Morton Feldman.
I encourage you to listen to the music
of Earle Brown.
I encourage you to listen to the music
of David Tudor and Henry Cowell, and Morton Subotnick, and Milton
Babbitt, and Louis and Bebe Barron, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, and
Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Hugh LeCaine, and Harry Partch, and Bulent
Arel, and Alvin Lucier and on and on and on.
More to come. Keep listening...always,
and be excellent to yourselves.
r
