Composition (2010) No. 6

For a solo performer (any instrument)

Attach as many microphones, pickups, phonographic cartridges, and contact mics to your instrument as possible. Feed these transducers in turn to as many different amplifiers and speaker systems as possible.

Using screwdrivers, chisels, chainsaws and whatever other tools you might need, disassemble your instrument, deconstruct it into as many different component parts as possible.

Perform a brief cadenza on each distinct part.

To the best of your ability, re-assemble and reconstruct your instrument.

Perform a brief cadenza on the reconstructed instrument.

Switch off the power.

[Please contact me in the event of any public performance of this piece]

Composition (2010) No. 5

For a trio of any three instruments

Imagine a labyrinth (the above will do, but any 2D or plan-view of a maze of sufficient complexity will suffice, providing it has a recognisable centre). It may help to place an image of the maze in front of you as you play, by way of a 'score'.

The first performer should imagine s/he must trace a continuous pencil-line through the maze from the entrance on the perimeter to the centre. The melodic 'line' that you play on your instrument should follow your imaginary pencil-line. If you must pause to think about where to turn, then you must pause. If you have gone the wrong way and must go back on yourself, then you must go back on yourself, retracing your steps the way you have come. But just as your pencil should not leave the page - neither should your fingers at any point leave your instrument.

Once the first performer has succeeded in going a sufficient distance into the labyrinth, the second performer should then give chase, following the line of the first performer into the maze. All the while, however, the second performer should be speeding up (accelerando) in order to try and 'catch' the first performer.

Once the first performer feels like the second performer has nearly caught up with them, they may 'jump', as it were, through one of the borders of the maze (it is up to the individual performer how this 'jump' is achieved through musical means, but the analogy must be sufficient for the audience, and especially the second performer, to recognise it). This leaves the second performer trapped in a loop, unable to go beyond the point at which the first performer 'jumped', unable to trace their path all the way to the exit, left to circle interminably. The first performer may then continue to the centre of the maze.

In the maze's centre, while the second performer continues to loop, the first performer now finds themselves forced to circle quite quickly around a small number (say, three or four) notes with fairly small intervals between them. For here, the first performer has encountered the 'minotaur' (our third performer).

Upon recognising the arrival of the first performer in the centre of the labyrinth, the third performer also begins to circle around the same number of notes - albeit with larger intervals between them and lasting for greater durations, as befits the minotaur's greater stature.

At an appropriate point, the first performer begins to 'flee', back through the labyrinth, and the third performer gives chase, following the line of the first performer, albeit slightly slower.

Finally, all three performers should meet at the point in the labyrinth where our second performer has been left in a loop. At which point they 'fight' - using repeated, stabbing single notes, of increasing force (crescendo) as 'weapons'. The 'fight' - and the composition - ends when all three players are dead.

[Please contact me in the event of any performance of this piece]

Getting Festive

The above from David Shrigley.

The below from The Pipettes (can be downloaded free from here).

30 Pounds of Bone - Method

In his (1637) Discourse on Method, Rene Descartes established doubt as the fundamental philosophical procedure. There is plenty of doubt to be found in the Method of 30 Pounds of Bone, but it is not, as Sergei Eisenstein would say, its dominant. The tenor here is rather a kind of yearning, delivered as much by the rising cadences of Jonny Lamb's voice as in any of the lyrics. This is a voice that, for all its gin-soaked weariness, belies a certain strange innocence, even naivete, that cannot help but be disarmingly winsome.

Though Jonny's ten songs are run through with a kind of haunted nostalgia for things that never quite were, laced with a repentance without rue or regret, the whole is far from sonic ludditism – even if ostensibly a folk record. This record is alive with the thrill of electricity and desiring machines. The Flying Dutchman reborn as the bastard child of Edison, Russolo and Deleuze.

A folk record perhaps, but a strangely rootless one, ten wanderer's tales with a jackdaw's approach to its multifarious traditions. Sea shanties lurch and swagger, upon melodies that sway and leap into flight, making this a record to sing along to, but not, as they, on the terraces. It is too fragile, too denuded for the mob. And not alone, either. This record is in good company and, for all its occasional cathartic melancholy, ultimately good cheer too. Rather, this is an album to which one imagines an entire pub full of people - somewhere in Cork perhaps - spontaneously bursting into and chanting 'til its end. It carries the beer-stained hall like a wave, taking tears and bruises alike in its tempestuous, maybe even slightly dangerous, path.

To discover oneself, suddenly, alarmingly, with no surer footing than sand and mud, and then to rebuild oneself through song, crafting one's principles as you go along, accepting nothing as given, and, finally, expelling all doubt through the careful avoidance of prejudice and precipitancy. It is not enough to have a good heart, one must bare it. And he does. With more wit and more soul than a thousand paper cowboys and cereal box balladeers. Don't be fooled by its swagger, these songs still need - and fully deserve - your deepest affections.