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“How does a gathering become a “happening”?
“The evolution of our ‘selves’ is already polluted by histories of encounter; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration.”
“There are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.”
- from The Mushroom at the End of the World, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Prelude:
This is an attempt at a new beginning for bcc:, through an idea that is not new for me (or really even in general), but has been postponed for all the reasons things have been postponed the past couple of years. In the “there are no songs” vein, I wanted to create a practice where an assortment of friends/musicians gather and play/record regularly. Who shows up will vary over time, as will the songs we play, and who plays what. There are no songs, and no band to play the songs.
These quotes from The Mushroom at the End of the World did not inspire this iteration of bcc: (I am only reading it now for the first time), but do corroborate it. I am excited at the idea of fostering what Tsing calls indeterminate encounters, and seeing happen around the song templates I have been working with. But I must also admit that this path forward is a reaction to a certain type of precarity. As I get older, and those I have played with in the past, schedules become busier, and it becomes more difficult to coordinate three or four lives around playing music together on a regular basis. This is not a material, life-or-death precarity, of course, but it is one that has eaten at me more and more recently. Playing music socially is something that had been a regular part of much of my life before the pandemic (through was even starting to become a struggle then), and something I’ve missed and struggled to restart. So here I am, trying to bring back the regularity by embracing some indeterminacy around who I will be playing with every other week.
About this "practice":
Present: Kaitlyn Flanagan, Abhay Singh, Sean Kelly, Brad Passarelli
Shut Up and Dance
Dusk, Rivanna River, Charlottesville | Dusk, Bird, Montauk
Appliance
So, 1/11/2022 was the first pass at this type of setup, and the first time I’ve played music with people in a couple of months. I was nervous, even though I have played with everyone before. Luckily, that nervousness quickly dissipated as we began playing and entering a space of focus. It felt good to be playing with others, trying to steer things without stopping, listening for points of interest--"happenings". There were some nice surprises. In all the years of DTCC, I don’t think I’d ever seen Sean play bass; he did a lot with bass chords, which I have a soft spot for. Out of us, he was coming in most blind to the songs, but he caught on quickly and moved them in directions I really liked. In the fade out on “Shut up and dance” I started playing off his bass rhythm, and it evolves into a more driven version of the song. Kaitlyn had some great samples from X-Minus One that make an appearance in this version of Appliance.
The recordings this practice are a bit messy; I didn’t check levels enough before getting going, so a lot of things were distorted and tracks had to be thrown out. The guitar is mostly EQ-ed into the mix from other mics since the one on the guitar was so unusable. In the long run, I think I generally want to to keep everything as-is, reserving overdubs for moments that might be saved for a record or something. That said, I did end up overdubbing the vocals, since they were also recorded rather poorly. To keep the spirit, I essentially re-sang whatever lyrics I happened to sing for the songs live, and only did 1-2 takes. In some sense this feels against the rules, but I wanted to share something that was at least moderately listenable.
Next practice happens 1/25, so there will be another one of these in the next couple of weeks. If you play music and this sort of thing interests you, feel free to reach out: robertjcardos@gmail.com
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