Mini portfolio: selected recent work
SLIP
Example Documentation from SLIP Residency Cafe OTO, Jul 2023
SLIP was a series of three interrelated events - solo performances - across three evenings, developed especially for this residency.
An attempt to radically re-examine through experimental performance: traditions and practices of drum-kit solo, experimental improvised music, algorithmic composition. A play between organic and synthetic movements, acoustic and digital sound, live improvisation and aleatory composition.
In advance of the residency I prepared a unique framework composition for each day, configuring the same things: drum kit elements, cymbals, synthetic percussion sounds, performed physical gestures, multichannel speaker playback, a number of fictional characters and conceptual ‘zones’ and the organisation of materials in the performance space. These compositions were then modulated through the experience of working in the space, and the preceding days activities.
“SLIP is a liquid which dissolves performers. The residency performances take place in this liquid. Among other things, this liquid-dramatic environment rejects novelty, encourages the pleasure of unstable edges and enhances a profound suspicion of what is fixed, limited. The residency starts - soaked in this liquid - by responding to a ‘Fish Glue Invitation’ written in (an unpublished) document called Gyri by the character Small, and others. The invitation proposes conditions for a live performance: ‘an alter-practice of ongoing unlearning; organic & synthetic movements: dissolving together somewhere between the truck joke and a heartbeat.’”
Performance documentation
Accompanying writing related to SLIP:
“This is a staged, imaginary situation (to help introduce a [research project]): where two fictional characters, a frog called FROX and something called THE SOMETIMES BALLOON, have a conversation. THE SOMETIMES BALLOON is a character who was developed during preparations for the SLIP series of performances, but in the end, did not participate. This imaginary conversation takes place over three days: 27, 28 and 29 June 2023. On these same three days, I performed three solo performances as part of a residency at Cafe OTO in London, called SLIP”
RUDE Meter (draft)
A character called FROX explains ideas about drum kit practice and algorithmic composition
“Focus: Small details in the feelings of movement, contact, non-contact, physical and musical-symbolic flexibility, breathing, physical balance and instrumental asymetry”
“I wanted the synthetic sound pulse environment to be constituted of precise but variable rhythmic structures/patterns, and that these rhythms would acknowledge or resonate with historical examples, musicological evidence, and my own subjective history. As Buchla says, ‘how complex can a metronome be?’”
Playing no solo imagination: Synthesising the rhythmic emergence of sound and sign through embodied drum kit performance and creative writing.
PhD. The University of Edinburgh, 2022.
The PhD explores the relationship between musical performance (specifically drumming) and writing through practice-based research. It investigates music as an ecology in which rhythm, sound, and bodily movement generate musical imagination and meaning. Using a hybrid drum kit, the research combines embodied cognition and creative writing, employing rhythm as a systematic method to explore biosemiotic interconnections between sound, body, and sign. The research also introduces fictional characters and imaginative spaces to challenge conventional ideas of solo performance and subjectivity. Two albums and a written thesis were grown.
Example score images, NSULAR:
"Akisakila" / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees)
"Akisakila" / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees), Pat Thomas & XT (Seymour Wright, Paul Abbott), Will Holder
Selected Recent Press, Reviews, Writing
Lee Rice Epstein, Free Jazz Collective and But Does It Swing?
“The point at which radical comes back around to tradition”
“stripping the drum back to some of its fundamentals, even while he is prying it apart and playing back a mix of true, invented, and manipulated sounds”
Edward George, A stick falling from a hand for forthcoming LP/CD SLIP
Edward George, On Drums, for Knees Elbow Bag