Selected recent work
Performance: SLIP, 2023
Example Documentation from SLIP Residency Cafe OTO, July 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 The residency starts - soaked in this liquid - by responding to a ‘Fish Glue Invitation’ written in (an unpublished) document called Gyri by the character Small, and others.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?’”
Publication: "Akisakila" / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees), 2022
"Akisakila" / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees), Pat Thomas & XT (Seymour Wright, Paul Abbott), Will Holder, 2022, LP, 2 x 12", Digital. Edition Gamut.
Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees) is a collaboration between XT (the duo of Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright) and pianist Pat Thomas.
Across the two LP sides (80 minutes), and four gatefold panels (13,331 words) together they reflect on, and take inspiration from, the late pianist, composer, poet Cecil Taylor.
On 12 August 2018, as part of a Cafe OTO tribute to the recently deceased Taylor, the trio perform live a 'version' of The Cecil Taylor Unit's 1973 Tokyo recording 'Akisakila'.
PhD: Playing no solo imagination, 2022
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.
Nsular
Digital Audio & PDF, 2021
NSULAR is the latest solo project by Paul Abbott. Includes 61 minutes of audio, across 5 tracks, and a 28 page booklet with new writing. NSULAR was written and recorded in Edinburgh and Brussels in 2020.
Through the sounds and words of NSULAR Abbott continues to develop his experimental research into drum kit, synthetic sound, algorithm, composition and improvised performance. NSULAR features experimental scores, speculative elements and fictional characters—DETECTIVE ENGINEER, QOSEL, and STRIKE.
Abbott feels his way through learning drums, rhythm and writing as fleshy research technologies. Following 2019’s DUCTUS, NSULAR is the latest stage in a process considering sound, the body, imagination, and language through music. This features as part of ongoing investigations using real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing.
Ductus
DUCTUS is the latest solo project by Paul Abbott, featuring 51 minutes of audio, across 12 tracks, and a 42 page booklet featuring new writing. DUCTUS was written and recorded in Edinburgh and Porto in 2019.
“Paul Abbott's Ductus is intelligent, complex, ludic and stern.
As with his earlier solos - Vagus [201x] and Sphuzo [201x] - Ductus continues a study of the natural, speculative and synthetic worlds qua real and imaginary drums. Its drum ducts are durable, mysterious and revealing.
Prone, the drumkit is sessile in quintessence, fixed around the drummer-on-stool-sat, increasingly stickily stuck, as music and the world (have) move(d) around it. Paul offers a possible solution through several lines of simultaneous enquiry – a gripping detection of rhythmic fact and fiction. A sleuth of several instruments, the Paul/drum/tech-kit times, eats and grows the skin and frames and stands and symbols and stuffs that stretch and swing between these facts and fictions.
He stories our imaginations and senses toward a progressive independence: back (in time (history near and far)); forward (in time (futures more and less speculative)); somatic (insides and on-skin) and prosthetic reach (stick, strike, spike). This pursuit and construction of events in time, through fact and fiction, realizes fictional fact. At its heart beats a new time for new times.”
—Seymour Wright, London 2019
X Ray Hex Tet, 2024
“X Ray Hex Tet”, X Ray Hex Tet. CD & Digital, 2024. Reading Group.
X-Ray Hex Tet is the confluence of Seymour Wright (alto saxophone), Crystabel Riley (drums), Edward George (words and recordings), Pat Thomas (piano and electronics), Paul Abbott (real and imaginary drums), and Billy Steiger (celeste and violin).
“From the sound of this album, recorded live at the Taktlos Festival in Zurich in 2023, the music of X-Ray Hex Tet appears well-nigh impossible to represent. After ascending to its vertiginous heights, though, what comes to mind is a small undercanon of music about history: not in any facile programmatic way, but in its very logic, on the level of form. (Think of Matana Roberts’s Coin Coin cycle, Iannis Xenakis’s Persepolis, Morton Feldman’s Coptic Light.) X-Ray Hex Tet intends towards totality, as a striving, as a gravitational pull. Our feet are swept up in Riley’s cascading drums and we reach out for some resolution to ground us but grasp only shards of alto saxophone, a cacophonous web of samples, gossamer string textures, and electronic whirrs. George’s voice emerges out of this thicket and hovers above it, intoning the names of—or reappearing as—those who have most recently represented the violent threshold of history. From this angle we are both under the avalanche and being blown away from it like a composite recording angel of history: there is no place outside the storm from which to reflect upon it.“
Publication: Very Good*, 2020
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 19th issue, “very good*” is edited with Paul Abbott. Like music, the issue’s “theme” is better off unaccounted for, and up in the air, like a flock of birds (creatures who feature heavily), circling around performance, listening bodies, given time, and loving relations.
The nineteenth issue of ‘F.R.DAVID’ is edited by Will Holder and Paula Abbott, and will serve as a reader for “We can still see the horizon (and it’s curved)”, a summer residency in Scotland led by the editors. It includes a surprising array of contributions from writer Jorge Luis Borges, journalist and writer Italo Calvino, composer Hugo Cole, literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith, percussionist Milford Graves, philosopher Michel Serres, novelist and essayist Wilson Harris, poet Bernadette Mayer, composer and music theorist Harry Partch, pianist and poet Cecil Taylor, and several others.
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