the improvisations

so, on the occasion of the 100th weekly improvisation i guess i want to say what it does for me...

and also what it doesn't do for me, for now, and that is make me any money, you never know, one day i may make a little something from it, D, who is currently managing john sinclair in england asked if i had a donations button on my website, "what if someone wanted to give you £1000? you should make it easy for them to do so"...

also i've been meaning for a year or so now to setup the buying(/selling) of mp3's of the improvisations on longcat.net, not that i know anyone would buy any but i think it's worth making it available, that cd is still for sale, (probably always will be) and i've sold exactly zero of them... partly through not promoting it enough and partly because the beauty of the improvisations... one of the beauty's... is that it's free...

just me doing what i do offering it to the world, take it or leave it...

so let's just talk a little about what it does...

every week i improvise... for my creativity this is great, even if what i do is often in a certain mode/mood and i don't always stretch myself, just playing, creating that space around me to play each week, this is beautiful...

every week i'm on camera... in terms of a future playing music for money it can't be bad to get more familiar and relaxed being in front of a camera...

every week i record and produce the music... my production skills have improved no end through this experience and will no doubt improve in fits and starts as long as i carry on... i'm no recording genius but i'm slowly learning how to get the sound i want...

every week i film and edit video... very similar point to the sound production, my editing has improved and will continue to improve... routinely doing something each week is a great discipline...

and following on from both those points the improvisation has encouraged me to invest in better stuff, my soundcard being the best example, camera's i'm still using the original camera i bought for myself back in april '05, along with the camera i got for christmas from dad and floopy's camera on loan on occasion, so no investment there yet but it could happen...

the improvisation encourages experimentation with instruments... kind of similar to the stuff point... but the space i give myself to fail, that i post whatever falls within the improvisation each week, not all of which is absolutely gold... in a way this means i can be more relaxed about delivering a perfect performance and take the odd risk in instrumentation as well as in harmony... not that i do this often but it's in there...

i seek out musicians to play with, this improvisation with john was the 16th collaborative from the 48 i've done in the 2nd year - so 1 in 3 since i decided to play with others... i'm playing soon (i hope) with a guitarist i met through a room booking dispute (well, no dispute really, it was his room i was just using it)...

i find it hard to quantify what it means for anyone else, i get comments over on deoxy every now and again and sometimes on my myspace blog where some people find the improvisations, also the odd individual in my life will mention it to me, mostly complimentary, not always...

i can see how many people have viewed each video and this is something, even if it's just a furtive obsession with numbers, as of now this improvisation (week 5, all that time ago) has been watched the most on googlevideo with 1749 views, a modest amount given almost 2 years of availability... i'm still amazed though that this improvisation, just a week later but on the more volatile youtube has so far been watched 13,599 times... that strange popularity the reason i got that cd out there for sale... sadly those youtubers don't like to spend money...

a growing body of work can't be argued with either... 100 weeks and i don't know how many hours... all still available to watch... 32 of them were watched yesterday...

the improvisation blanket and the random improvisation pages on my website i religiously update every week and they get very few hits... i'm fond of both of them, the random because it does what it says on the tin, and the blanket because it's just lovely seeing them all laid out like that... i'm aware though that it's a bit mad going to that page on my computer and we've got pretty good broadband in this house, it must be painfully slow on some computers..

ok, so it's not an exhaustive list of what's good for me about the improvisations but it's enough for now...

"congratulations on hundreds more to come" as john graciously put it... i'm digging the hundredthness of it x