ronin phasing: an artist’s statement

 

My musical activity has spun mostly around “what ifs”. I’m constantly listening for what’s just beyond earshot, for something that might be emerging just around the next corner. Much of the time, I’m trying to sound something I haven’t heard yet and don’t really know what it’ll be, or finally, what that’ll feel like; although it’s definitely feeling – and curiosity -- that pulls me on. I’m attracted to sounds and changes that move me, even if I don’t really know what they’ll be. And what I’m sensing through feeling forms just one part of the terrain I’m attending to.

For me, music’s not a detached “sonic product” that’s produced or “made”. Rather it’s an interaction of sound with attention, sound and relationships. And the unknown in music stretches into the felt thinking that makes the sounds actual. Music’s, then, not purely any single component, but a circulating complex. It’s process, not object, something that people actively do.

There are huge differences between constructing a sonic monument via notation, command structures or electronic outsourcing and the more reciprocal, interactive composing usually called improvisation. Musical compositions are both sonic and social. They designate both a sonic design and interactive matrix that channels the communications among musicians generating its sonic image. A composition for improvisers is not, as it is in nearly all Euroclassical and much pop music, the end of a compositional process. It platforms and launches live composing into motion. Imperative. Resistance. Catalyst.

Ronin phasing, solo presentation, steps aside from concerns with intrasocial musical structures to explore musical self sufficiency, independent of necessary collaborations with any sonic community. The components focus down to sound, instrument, body, attention, imagination. A composition in this context functions as the irritant that initiates the pearl or the stone or wood that resists and impels direct carving. It situates a reference matrix, a family of very, very gradually developing ideas among which I can walk around and interact with from any which angle I might.

The always-just-around-the-corner magnetism partially grows out of compositional ideas that vehicle and bridge states of motion I’m still learning about. Some of the platforms I’m working through have been in play for as long as three decades, but one reason they continue to yield new possibilities is their scale. They aren’t “tunes”, but thinking-movement systems that are hinged through the interaction of various melodic-rhythmic identities.

I’ve been applying melody in my compositions as an identifier for contrasting movement states as they interact, and I’m intrigued with a deeper synthesis of the repetitively stable state constellations of complex polyrhythm within the flexible narrative motion demonstrated by Charlie Parker or Ornette Coleman. I call patterned dynamic shifting among dissimilar kinetic conditions metagroove, which I first witnessed in the music of the CJQ in my native Detroit several decades ago. This is an area of exploration so underdeveloped since that it’s still new.

I’ve been developing metagroove compositions with my ensemble sonic openings under pressure since the early 80s, but it was only in the past few years that I could even consider incorporating these into solo performance. Most of the compositions consist of a series of cells defined by at least two contrary simultaneous lines, usually in different meters or tempo strata such as 4:3 or 5:3, etc. Each cell flows (when not colliding or leaping or…) into the succeeding one until a more extended melodic image is articulated. The curve of this progression unfolds a distinctive feel, or metagroove (which is a gestalt feel imparted by these successive grooves).

The adventure is learning how to think and imagine this way while composing in the moment. There’s no map or example for how to do this, especially in a solo context. Some other generating practices I’m exploring include mad quilting, which rhythmically intercuts patchworks of disparate components of the music. Another is loop wrapping, which continually reenters a phrase in the round from different approach opportunities. All of this exercises a kind of non-linear, recombinant sonic genetics. Time develops a really different logic through these practices, and the more coherent my understanding of these elements, the more freedom there is. It’s essentially work in progress that continues to change and develop.

-- patrick brennan