bog jisms at tina

many thanks to mim and danny for the photos of our log rhythm session at tina in october.

bog jism in public

[by nick]

yo. who’s free this wednesday night for a bog jism in public? and secondly, where and what should we do? we could go back to “the tunnel”, with it’s flow of bemused pedestrians. I’ve had a few other ideas for Bog Jism practice: 1. doing it outside the QVB, in particular near the statue of the Queen, in the aural shadow of that weird voice that speaks and freaks the unsuspecting out. 2. the walking bog. where we walk down a street in the city – any street with shops basically – and log what we encounter. 3. the wall bog. we go down to Sydney’s own 5km “wall” and log by the side of it.

whaddya reckon?

Notes on the Splinter Orchestra & Log Rhythms

 [by nick]

Last Monday night, diSmithive and I went over to thelastbastionofcivilisation, which is a warehouse space above Mao & More on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Cleveland Street. We had to use the buzzer to get let in, and later on it became apparent that the noise of this buzzer would have occured during the beginning of the Splinter Orchestra set, which was already begun though barely above a restrained silence. The buzzer was a chance part of the total aural environment, as was the creaks of the audience in their chairs, the whispers and exchange of money at the front desk, the slight shifting of instruments by the performers.

The orchestra was 15-20 members playing the following instruments and more: snare drum and percussion, accordion, electric bass, double bass, cello, various types of saxophones and trumpets, violin, numerous variants of flute, laptops, and heaps more. The second piece they played involved a “conductor”, where a member of the orchestra raised a yellow piece of paper with a letter on it and slowly moved it from left to right across the orchestra. When then letter reached a performer, sometimes they played, sometimes they didn’t. It was obviously some sort of trigger. In the interval I went and talked to the “conductor”, Gerard, who told me the trigger was a secret, asked me to guess and then told me anyway. If the letter being shown was in your Christian or last name then you played a “note”. I also spoke to him about his influences, and he cited John Zorn and John Cage, but also spoke about mathematicians in quantum mechanics who inspired him. He was interested in a deep intuitive level of connection between people, beyond surface cause and effect, for him, where logic is pushed so for it starts to become mysticism.

What was immediately obvious was that the Splinter Orchestra is precisely the same territory as Log Rhythms aims towards. DiSmithive agreed with me on this, and was very impressed with what he called the ‘dialoguing’ going on in the orchestra. He did opine however (god forbid there be indeterminacy in his position) that the orchestra had 12-tone notes as a structural, if not basis, then touchstone from which to ‘dialogue’. Perhaps, yes, but a radically liberal notion of notes if there was one. But I do agree with there being a touchstone – more or less a structure – that allows Splinter to cohere on this intuitive level. I suggested that our touchstone could be silence, but it occurs to me now that maybe silence is Splinter’s touchstone also. But what do we mean by silence? I think of silence in this context as much (if not more) a listening or attentiveness to the total performance ecology rather than simply a not entering noise into the piece.

In any case, the point is that Splinter does have this intuitive dialoguing going on, and I think we would do well to look at it very closely to see what we can glean, or simply appropriate. One thing that struck me was the way the orchestra played its instruments. There was not one single so-called “pure” note and everyone was playing their instruments “wrongly”, most players looked like they were finding new sounds from their instruments by experimenting with it in ways it’s “not supposed” to be experimented with. In other words, there was a complete renunciation of the idea of individual virtuosity. Many people were adding sounds to the total work that were practically indistinguishable – for example, a blow of air through a wind instrument with no ‘note’ or resonance – but which did add to the total work. If someone had burst forth with a virtuoso solo or even just a ‘pure’ note, it would have destroyed the piece. This became glaringly analogous to our situation with Log Rhythms: the more a log has in connection with an individual, intentional, composed work the less it seems to fit into the total work. It seems to me if you have something with it’s own kind of structure, intention, narrative, rhythm, etc – i.e. a work in it’s own right – and you try to bring that own right of the work into the collective log, then it becomes less likely to succeed. I would say this is because that individual work prioritises it’s own righteousness (so to speak) over the total group performance, and by contrast, work that has an irreverent relationship to its own righteousness is more likely to succeed. A concrete example might be Aden’s experiments in logging. Last Sunday he brought some prose-y poem-y work. Almost immediately he realised he could not feed them into the group piece as they were, and so began to sample from them at will. This worked a whole lot better, but I would suggest that it still didn’t click as well as his choice of playing the kazoo at Graham Ave. It should be mentioned however that last Sunday at Albany Rd didn’t click as a whole like it did at Graham Ave all those weeks ago.

Another way of saying all this is we’re all still grappling with what exactly to log. I think the necessity of a focus on the total performance necessitates a lot of questions about the nature of how and what we write or produce. I find these questions fascinating and essential, though I am aware that others may not, but I think this is the challenge of this piece.

meeting this sunday, 29 july

[by astrid]

after a braindead discussion last night, we noted that sundays are a problem for energy and chutzpah — most people are shells of men/women by sunday night, and after a meal and a couple of longnecks, we can’t even muster a giggle at aden’s moose-knuckle. however, every week night proposes problems also, so we’re going to try an earlier sunday time (no later than 6pm) and have a hour/hour and a half jam session and then dinner at 8ish, with a nice relaxed descent into digestion and friendly chatter.

so, this sunday, 6pm at the stanmore manor. bring a found-object to log as well as the beginnings of ideas of a composed log material.

cheers.

log jam

[by nick]

last thursday at the graham avenue branch we had heaps of fun, or at least i did, and we made great progress on log rhythms. we were very fortunate to have both tim rox and miri present for playtime, both of whom have background and knowledge of improvised performance. i think their presence helped push us to the next level. so thanks to them. i wanted to outline the variations of log rhythms that we now have on the experimental table, discussing the issues surrounding each (as i understand them) and offering the order of these variations as a potential order in which the performance might happen. these models and names of models are the result of crankys discussion paper presented in rozelle about a month ago, and the subsequent trials of and additions to these models.

model 1: the central text generator, or the chance generator.

in this model a central text is used as the “conductor” around which the “loggers” orientate or “trigger” their logs. the central text is required, it seems, to be made up of a string of repeating words or numbers, the order of which alters. each logger chooses one of the triggers, and no-one chooses the same one. it has been suggested that numbers work best as the central text, in that they are the easiest to hear amidst the total group sound. in trialling, this model has been the most likely to become cluttered and descend into shouting over one another. three things have been suggested in this regard. firstly, the encouragement to silence if the total performance needs it. secondly, having a larger number of words or numbers in the central text which weren’t don’t act as triggers. and third, reading the central text at a much slower rate. is it left to the reader of the central text to decide the tempo?

[a thought: perhaps the tempo of reading the central text could be itself subject to chance. one way would be to establish a tempo range, i.e. a faster and slowest tempo at which the performance still "works", i.e. doesn't become incoherent. we could have as a range, for example: fast, medium fast, medium, slow, very slow, extremely slow. if we said that we intend to use all of these tempos within the one performance, we could randomise this order.]

model 2: the conductor rules.

someone takes on the role of the conductor, and freely controls who logs when. potentially, they also control volume and tempo. the next question is, how do they trigger each log? when joel was conductor at rozelle, he used names. astrid stumbled upon another way at marrickville last week, when she used numbers, ostensibly to trial model 1, but ended up knowing each loggers number trigger, and thus conducted the piece. the most obvious issue with this model is the power ceded to the conductor, and how that sits within the wider idea of the performance, and it’s collectivity.

model 3: the map

someone, prior to the commencement of the performance, draws a map (like a single line graph) visible to everyone, and the performers interpret the map and guage from each other where on the map the performance is. there is wide ranging possibilities in this model, depending on how much the map is left to interpretation. a structure to inform the performers of where on the map the performance is at has been suggested to reduce differences in interpretation. alternatively, it has been argued that the variations in interpretation are precisely what’s interesting about this model, and rather than eliminating them, work with and revel in them.

model 4: the jam.

we tried this as the last thing of the night, and despite the general tiredness, it was the one that, i sensed, really excited everyone and made the night really worthwhile. interrelationships between loggers and their logs began to emerge and play themselves out delightfully. there was synchronism, contrast and dynamic beginning to happen. this was because we reached a new level of listening to each other and to the total group sound. i wonder how other people feel about this, but it felt to me that the free jam has the potential to be the pinnacle realisation of the log rhythms project.

an interesting variation: the nemesis.

as suggested by tim rox, in reference to something that the sydney based splinter orchestra do, we can have a variation, for any of the above models, whereby each logger chooses another logger to be their nemesis. one way to realise the nemesis variation is to say that: you can never be logging whilst your nemesis is logging. It seems to me that there could be many fruitful ways of having a nemesis, perhaps only excluding the type where you try to shout over the top of your nemesis.

post-script:

pinnacle or no, i think it’s a good idea to rephrase something that diSmithive said about improvised jazz. these jazz musicians come to the improvisation from a basis of high skill and discipline in their instrument, and that this discipline and skill is a large part of what allows the freedom and comfort within the improvised performance. in other words, we need to hone our logging material and becomes experts in how we log it.

The conductor is what.

[by Cranky]

Right now the conductor as I understand is a director-style figure, everyone else seems to just slot in around this person somehow. The way they fit seems to be entirely at the discretion of the conductor/boss. The boss says (however they say it): “number 1, go now! number 2, go now! number 3 and number 4, go now! number 2, shut up! number five, go now! number 5 and number 1, shut up!” etc etc.

This makes the whole game a game more or less owned by the boss, their manner of ‘conducting’ is at their discretion (indeed the ingenuity of this could make or break the game as it now stands) and everyone else seems to slot in at the behest of the boss. This model makes everyone peripheral, more or less, which I don’t think is great. Furthermore the way the individual ‘logs’ rap together depends on how good the boss is basically. The individual bits could each be pure genius but if the boss doesn’t have an enthralling and ingenious way of prompting everyone, or if the boss through the conducting produces a mishmash that just doesn’t work in a performative sense then that’s it, craphola. Unless experimenting (and failing) in public for it’s own sake is your major source of satisfaction then I’m not sure it’s so great to go along with a model of the boss/conductor as it stands presently.

To me there’s a number of things we can/should do to rejiggle the scenario at this point to avoid a bad outcome. I propose each of these with the hope that they will increase the group ownership of the ‘conducting’ thing (rather than leave it totally at the discretion of one person). That way if it all flops we all need to re-evaluate, and not just go “dude that was crap” to the boss-person.

ONE: we all collaborate like motherfuckers and devise an excellent mode of conducting. We do this BEFORE someone is elected/chosen/self-nominated as the boss. That way (in theory) anyone can be conductor, in theory a name could be pulled from a hat on any given night and whammo! They’re the boss for the next agreed-upon period of time (ten minutes, half a performance, the net twelve billion performances, whatever). This agreed-upon mode of conducting should emphasise creativity so that the boss isn;t left in a purely directorial or practical role.

EXAMPLE: the group decides that the mode will be reading their work or performing it as they normally would, however whoever is elected boss must specify particular words that start/stop the others. For example, the boss tells everyone a different start word and stop word that occurs in their log, everyone then has to begin and pause their logs whenever those words arise in the boss’s own logging. You could have words that tell everyone to start or pause, words that tell every second logger to start or pause (or either), or any variety really…. Now this may work, it may work in part, it may not work, maybe everyone will dig it but maybe nobody will, I’m not sure I do. But the idea is to embed the prompts within something creative, rather than have a series of flash cards or hand signals or something (unless the boss’s log is a whole poem read in Auslan or if they happen to be a dancer?!?!)

TWO: We reverse the process, ie a boss is elected, then everyone else listens/watches the boss’s logging once or twice, and selects for themselves (ie not telling anyone else) moments they would like to start and pause, eg they choose words, gestures, moments that seem to fit snugly with their own logging… This may seem to defeat the purpose of being “indeterminate” (gag barf vomit… sorry…) but think about it, if nobody else knows where people will start/finish/pause etc then all sorts of confusing shit coul happen. Whether “confusing” is the particular brand of “indeterminacy” (BBBLLLUUUUEEEERRRG GGHHH!!!!!!!!!) we’re after is another matter entirely. This way also removes a lot of the ‘power’ from the hands of the boss figure and delivers it in a (potentially) poisoned chalice way to the loggers themselves, even though the boss’s logging is still integral.

EXAMPLE: I get up and perform my log as the designated boss, I say the words “Every day I vex about sausage on bread and I always smell onions when I’m in bed I wish I was dead I wish I was dead put a bullet in my head” over and over for three minutes. Someone decides to themself that they’ll start every time they hear the word “vex” and finish the first time they hear the word “wish”, someone else  also decides to themselves they’ll start with the word “sausage” and wait until the next time they hear “sausage” until they stop, then they start again with the next “sausage”, then the third logger may start their bit at “bread”, pause at “onions”, start at “bed, pause at “bullet”.

THREE: the boss figure is moved throughout a single performance. So say if nine or ten of us are involved, we choose three people to be bosses and the rest are ‘mere’ loggers. I guess this could be done with either of the above two proposed modes. If we tried multiple bosses with the first above, then the bosses would each have to fit with the group-proposed mode of conducting however may have the discretion between themselves of deciding who prompts who, or maybe one boss would be the one who gave “starting” triggers to the loggers, one would be in command of the “pause” triggers, and one would be in change or “everyone start/stop”. It could get strange. OR if we incorporate mode two and three then individual loggers decide or themselves who they’ll be triggered by and when and then let the bosses figure out among themselves how/in what order they’ll do their ‘boss logs’. The boss figures themselves could work in an integrated way, ie they could trigger each others’ logging and let whatever devised method of triggering the others take its course.

“EXAMPLE: I really don;t think I could be bothered trying to make an example out of this. But I think the best bit of a ‘multiple boss’ scenario is that the onus isn’t purely on one boss, and that we are dealing with a model of conducting that involves offshoots and branches and roots (hehe) in a multi-layered sense… could be pretty hard to pull off (hehe) in practice, but as some have said we should try before we buy (or don’t buy?).

Let me clarify that these proposals are just that. I won’t cry if they get chucked out. They do not represent a desire to ‘organise’ a previous proposal that rested on an indeterminate (heave chuck spit) notion of performance. I *think* what “indeterminate” (yargggghhh) means is a way we can all pursue our own shit within a framework that accommodates both individual work and brings it all together in a flexible way, in a way that can change from day to day and does not propose one person perform the same function within that framework. I think. It all sounds complicated and pretty systematised I know, but did anyone imagine that it would be simple?

That’s all for now. Have a nice thingy.

if not for the indeterminacy, then for the barley soup

hi,

there will be a meeting this sunday evening at 6pm at the stanmore manor. i think we’re going to concentrate on log rhythms, so bring along some material to log. (and can someone come up with something for nick, so he doesn’t sing again?) i will make a soup for all, and maybe even toast if i’m feeling frivolous. give me a call or email if you need address, directions, or friendly conversation.

a

log rhythms revival

log rhythms has been the subject of many a revival discussion. aden brought the idea up at the meeting last thursday, and it seems there is enthusiasm for it. the good thing being there is a fair amount of work people have sitting around from the first aborted log rhythms. even better is that most of us are a lot more comfortable (at least conceptually) with what the performance would/could be a year down the track. thinking about it, log rhythms is really the best way we can make movements towards collaborative performance. i’m not sure to what level people share a desire to experiment with semi-spontaneous and semi-indeterminate group performance work. there are very concrete reasons why i want to lean in this direction, which at times i have attempted to express, but mostly failed. i think, for clarity’s sake, i should write down at length my allegiances to this type of art – but this is not the time.

the architecture of log rhythms, as it was, has and must be altered. as it existed prior to abortion, the log rhythms fetus had a single ‘conductor’ (i.e. dictator) to whom the burden of being a time fascist fell upon. also, the old version of log rhythms imagined only one log at a time (i.e. aden’s log for 20 seconds, then haylee logs for 20 seconds…etc). the stupidity of both these things became clear after miri and myself had talked at length about the idea. actually, miri and i have been having impromtu discussions about log rhythms for some time now. many of the discussions were about the ideological nature of the performance as an active game of participation, but i think we made pragmatic headway in terms of agreeing that there still needs to be a ‘conductor’, but that the conductor is drawn from the performing group, and the role alternates amongst the group. different conductors will produce different work from the group. Secondly, and though it seems somewhat obvious now, the conductor can trigger multiple logs at once (i.e. aden and haylee logging at once). these changes to the architecture eliminate the dictator/time fascist role from the work, which is good, but what replaces it?

there are two issues here. the first is that of the layering of logs over each other. this invites a poo metaphor. when layering the turd, should each individual turd be given its own place in the toilet water, floating and bobbing comfortably? or should it just layer one on top of the other, so the one below becomes obscured? * the issue is one of the performance ecology. is there an expectation, if not a rule, that each performer has to pay attention to what jackson mac low calls “the total sound environment” and logs with according decorum. in other words, do we make a pact to not drown each other out? or……

this leads to the second issue, which is an issue of relationship. what is the relationship of the conductor to the performers? how much control can the conductor exert? do we give the conductor the power to ask more volume of some and less of others (this would answer the above issue to some degree)? there are many questions in this area, most of which will hopefully answer themselves as we go. it would seem that there must be a level of “free will” for the performers, since they are the ones choosing what is being put into the collective piece, yet they concede to the conductor the freedom to choose when and for how long they log in.

what kind of relationship is this? are we satisfied with it?

what next?

nick.
* i guess it depends on the size of the toilet bowl and what you had to eat the day before.