The John Fox Company

Although I particularly enjoyed the music that arose from the various experimentations in my previous group, I decided to try something a little different by teaming up with Nate and Ben to produce some more experimental music via The John Fox Company (a rather peculiar nomenclature). As we demonstrated for the class, our music is reliant on electronic devices to aid us in the texturing of the soundscape. Of paramount importance is the looping system we are continually updating each week, where we shift around the roles of instrumentation and electronics operator, but the goal is the same - to dynamically generate themes out of layered sounds.

The looping capability allows us to begin with an idea, set it "in stone," and then explore new ideas that relate to previous ideas. In a sense, we are going on a random walk but we have a concrete memory of where we've been. Each new idea, each sequence of sounds, is imprinted in the music, and the sound as a whole begins to grow. Again, order from chaos is created. Each random tidbit of sound is superimposed on all previous random sounds to create a super-structure that exhibits order. Each individual thought, when separated from this continuous stream of music into discrete bits, seems to have no apparent meaning when isolated.

Another thing that is worth noting is that we have also been testing the boundaries of improvisation in a subtle way. When we sit down and perform a song outside of class, we typically generate a theme from that particular session. Once we have a theme, we consider it another song that we have, as though we could simply write it down and have it forever. Instead, after randomly creating a song by pure improvisation, a theme surfaces, which we then extract and say "That's a new song. Let's call it ____." However, when we perform that song again, we are merely picking the theme as a starting point, and not playing the song exactly as it was first performed. We still improvise, but we stick to the theme that initially emerged. So far we have produced some interesting and fun pieces, and we continue to shuffle around the equipment that we employ, so I think we are headed in a good direction as a group.