Been in London working with Gold Panda this week. We did a fair bit of improvisation, which is something I’ve never really bothered with. I’ve always thought it was more fun to be involved in the improvising than in the listening/watching. Which is still true, but it was so much fun to make that now I’m into it.
I’ve also wondered for years how electronic duos work - especially since most of the acts I grew up listening to were duos. It seemed alien to me, I was so used to making electronic music alone and taking time to perfect a beat that adding anyone else into the mix was weird. How can you tweak stuff for hours if someone else is there?
So anyway, we did some live laptop stuff: generating sounds, trying to stay in time and sampling each other’s noises and the telly to create something new. I haven’t listened to the results other than a little blast when we finished. I’m kinda thinking maybe I won’t. But it felt and sounded good at the time.
We also spent some time at The Roundhouse working in the studio there with some sound engineering students. That was pretty great, and the fact that a lot of time was spent teaching the students mic techniques made us feel less bad about not really having any songs for them to record. Still, we recorded some drums and had time to record another long improvised track - this time with me on drums and Panda working the MPC. This was again, pretty enjoyable (in a different way to improvising in a traditional band).
All in all, I kinda realised how electronic collaboration works, and that improvisation is no longer a strange idea that I cannot be bothered with. It’s still probably more fun to make than to listen to, but still, I think I’ve been missing out.
