I spent a lovely few hours today with David Stevens, a wonderful musician working mainly with abstract drones and soundscapes, often using bowed strips of metal to create the most amazing textures.
We met through Tuttle, and have been talking for a while about recording together, and today it finally happened, though not without an hour or so of technical faffing thanks to some problematic gear…
Anyway, we still managed to record an epic 45 minute long improv, which is embedded below. It starts pretty atonal, and goes through some very strange and often beautiful places. It definitely rewards listening on good headphones or decent speakers as opposed to laptop speakers, and is a long way from the chords ‘n’ tunes approach of most of my solo stuff.
Give it a listen, if beautiful strangeness be your thing, and have a read of David’s blog post about it.
https://soundcloud.com/davidestevens/falling-embers
For the technically minded, I was playing bass through my Lexicon and the Looperlative. David was playing flugelhorn and a strip of bowed metal through his laptop setup running MAX/MSP for processing/looping. It’s often tricky to work out who’s making what noises in this…