Deconstructing subjectivity – exploring electronics in live improvisation
In the pilot project Audio Activist Improvisation, I together with composer and improviser Jonatan Sersam and composer and improviser Fabio Monni aimed to investigate how electroacoustic devices may be explored as tools for live improvisation in combination with acoustic instruments, such as piano and voice. The over-arching aim of the pilot was to develop our artistic means and strategies in live music creation. We wished to investigate how digital devices and software might be used by us as improvisers, in order to extend and en-hance the musical ideas. Another focal point is how technological extensions could be used as a means to sepa-rate the instrumental voices, in order to give them more characteristic attributes, or the opposite, to blend them together. The method to achieve this was to use sound technology as a tool for developing our ways of integrating and intertwining performative and structural aspects of music making into the live improvisa-tional processes. Expanding the improvisers’ possibilities to vary the sound qualities and spatial circumstances during the emergent improvisations, could be seen as ways of further integrating and developing structural aspects of composition into the perspectives of the performers.
In line with the experiences from Facet Labs in 2014, this was also an opportunity for me to further investigate the possibilities of transcending the subject position of the monologue singer with the aid of sound techniques.