Unofficial Channels: Free Improvisation

As improvised music has just about recovered from being dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age, its practitioners and proprietors have embraced the internet as a platform for distributing music. For financial, logistical and political reasons, finished music is increasingly being offered for free consumption. Benedict Drew’s A Folding Table album, released at benedictdrew.com, quickly attracted more listeners than any CD release might have been capable of. It came complete with artwork and was offered at a CD quality bitrate. This last factor is crucial. While many Improv musicians long gave up hope of making money from CDs, the unpredictable quality of illegal downloads remains a bugbear. The falling cost and complexity of setting up a website gives musicians a quick and simple way of getting music out there on their own terms, and with more listeners comes more invitations to play live – the preferred reward for many improvising musicians. Others offering finished works for free include Mattin, whose entire w.m.o/r and Dexetea labels are available for free at mattin.org, and Vienna based laptopper Tim Blechmann, who offers a number of complete recordings from tim.klingt.org. Both contribute to klingt.org, a communal resource used by many improvisors to make music available for free.

Netlabels offering free Improv downloads are springing up by the day. The cream of them includes homophoni.com, a label with the simple philosophy of presenting only the best music they can find – effectively a normal label without the physical objects and with just as much attention paid to the visual presentation of the work. In the UK, compostandheight.com covers Improv and creative field recording and makes quality new music available at quite a rate.

Unsurprisingly, few CD labels have made the move to digital only releases, but taking a copyleft stance, labels like taumaturgia.com and unrevenu.free.fr have made new CD releases simultaneously available as free downloads. The former recently released a superb recording by Radu Malfatti and Taku Unami, the latter an excellent first solo by double bassist Guillaume Viltard.

A few musicians have begun to explore the potential of the internet in a different manner. Benedict Drew, Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright have chosen to document their every get-together online. Their suspended-pole-holds-tree.tumblr.com site contains an archive of their informal playing sessions, alongside drawings and even photos of what the trio had for lunch, so sharing more than just the music with the listener. The downloadable format means that the musicians do not have to worry about creating something that fits neatly on a CD. Perhaps through this project a glimpse of the future can be found.

Richard Pinnell