Dialogue

SOOT. WE GROW MUSIC!

Paul Abbott

Start

The Bororo (neighbouring tribe) boast that they are red araras (parakeets). This does not merely signify that after their death they become araras, nor that araras are metamorphosed Bororos, and must be treated as such. It is something entirely different. ‘The Bororos’, says Von den Steinen, who would not believe it, but finally had to give in to their explicit affirmations, ‘give one rigidly to understand that they are araras at the present time, just as if a caterpillar declared itself to be a butterfly’.¹

Introduction

This is a staged, imaginary situation (to help introduce a [research project]): where two fictional characters, a frog called FROX and something called THE SOMETIMES BALLOON, have a conversation.

The character FROX was developed during the writing of another text, called Rude Meter (Froxspeak), which is also related to the WE GROW MUSIC! project, and deals specifically with ideas about metre, time and pressure. THE SOMETIMES BALLOON is a character who was developed during preparations for the SLIP series of performances, but in the end, did not participate.

This imaginary conversation takes place over three days: 27, 28 and 29 June 2023. On these same three days, I performed three solo performances as part of a residency at Cafe OTO in London, called SLIP.²

Day 1

A conversation, and later a performance named Frx5 (N) Fish Glue Invitation taking place on Tuesday 27 June 2023, 8 p.m.:

FROX: Hello. I want to introduce the project WE GROW MUSIC! to you. It is a project I have been involved with from the start, but only really now have started to talk about. I am a fictional creation, originally developed as the project explored ideas to do with the measurement of time. My role is to sometimes articulate particular themes of the project.

TSB: Hi, good to meet you. I’m THE SOMETIMES BALLOON, and borrow my name from traces of a great story that Paul recalled from his reading of writer Nathaniel Mackey’s influential work. I’m also a fictional character. I grew during preparations for Paul’s solo performances at Cafe OTO, which was also related to this same research, but in the end did not myself perform.

FROX, can you tell us a bit more about this WE GROW MUSIC! project?

FROX: Okay, yes; I thought it would be humorous to think about this introduction as a sort of ‘advertisement’ (not that I am trying to sell anything).

I also often find analogies from food and cooking helpful. Perhaps this project could be thought of as a sort of advertisement for or invitation to a recipe (rather than a particular dish).

TSB: I don’t understand, can you explain?

FROX: I suppose this is just a way to get into talking about parts and the whole, which are really one thing, but present themselves differently to us, depending on where we are in time. The ingredients of the project are quite basic, perhaps familiar. Among them: a drum kit, the human body and writing.

TSB: Ok...

FROX: So, the project I am introducing on behalf of myself and Paul is about how it feels and what it sounds like when somebody (me, FROX, or Paul) plays a drum kit: and how to feel or know a bit more about what is going on.

TSB: Is this an abstract investigation?

FROX: No, a real, actual, acoustic drum kit is played.

TSB: By whom?

FROX: By all of us! Which means I can talk about playing the drums, and I think it is easier for this chat if we think of me playing the drums as a sort of placeholder: that actually Paul might be the one playing, or you might be or whoever. Does that make sense?

TSB: Hmm. Sort of. Let’s just say you are playing the drums, for now!

FROX: Okay, so, sometimes I play the drum kit on my own and other times with other people who play other instruments. The musical playing is mainly improvised and experimental (in the sense that I don’t exactly know what is going to happen, and I/we are exploring what can be done, as we do it). Sometimes this happens in private, other times in public. To learn more about all this, I do it, over and over again, in different ways.

TSB: Okay, this sounds quite chaotic . . .

FROX: In a way, maybe; but this not exactly knowing what is going to happen is a core concern of this project. It is also a basic aspect (it seems to me) of the reality of many general life situations.

In terms common in music practices, I started to approach this by thinking about the mix of improvisation and composition in a given situation. In more general terms, perhaps this could be thought of as trying to discover more about complexity and structure. Specifically, how structures are developed, in advance, during, or after play, how these structures are acting on the performer, or how they might emerge in response to the musical situation. This is a time-based matter, as an investigation into the experience of music, but significantly, non-linear.

TSB: I’ve also often wondered how to approach the super complex situation of live music playing: a lot is going on, all at the same time, to start to understand the ‘parts of the puzzle’. That is, when you want to get words involved, rather than understand primarily with the body.

FROX: Yes, exactly, this is how I got to finding (or falling on) some concepts that felt familiar, and kept coming back: ATTENTION, DISCREPANCY, MULTIPLICITY, ECOLOGY.

I thought of these concepts as like a bunch of lenses, that might offer some new ‘angles’ to ask some of the same key questions.

TSB: When do these concepts arrive in this process?

FROX: Well, I feel it is important to say that the concepts don’t ‘arrive’ in the order of: first, abstract intellectual thinking, then concept(s) emerge, then concepts are used as lenses to investigate/feel something particular in the body. I experience thinking as an integrated process happening throughout the body and ‘mind’, if ‘mind’ is some placeholder for an idea of intellectual thought.

TSB: Okay, a predictable comment maybe, but what do all those terms mean: ATTENTION, DISCREPANCY, MULTIPLICITY, ECOLOGY?

FROX: Well, at first, I thought ATTENTION has to do with a sort of physical/mental focus, in the sense of feeling or thinking about one detail (perhaps at the expense of the wider field). But now I’m thinking it is more about how it might be possible to simultaneously focus evenly on a field of information (sounds, for example) whilst the body might do something very accurate, and the physical/mental feeling is one of ‘focus’. Relaxation seems to be important. DISCREPANCY is an idea approached in a really interesting way by the musicologist Charles Keil, and also a feeling I had over and over in group music situations, when things felt good, and full of potential.

TSB: Ah yes, I remember Keil writing about when things are ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune’ and when ‘lexical meanings’ are various and ambiguous for a particular phenomenon…³

FROX: Exactly. For MULTIPLICITY and ECOLOGY, I suppose I think of these ideas as: helpfully suggesting that an interesting (musical) situation to explore is one in which the many discrepant features of the music co-exist, and can produce multiple feelings, responses, subjectivities... Maybe all at the same time, in a very dynamic way. And that this is a sort of ecological situation.

TSB: Like something organic, natural?

FROX: Exactly, even thinking that, or having the mental image of it, has somehow helped me to feel that that is how it is, or to allow things to be more organic.

TSB: Right. Feel like we’re getting pretty weird and abstract now though.

FROX: Apologies. I do get excited. Particularly before the post-lunch dip.

TSB: Okay.

FROX: I just want to connect all this to the idea of lenses I mentioned before, which in turn makes me think of instruments. I had written this in my notebook:

I think of these concepts – ATTENTION, DISCREPANCY, MULTIPLICITY, ECOLOGY – as lenses through which we can look at a (perhaps familiar) problem or issue (what does playing the drums feel like, what is going on in live music?) with some limitations, some focus. I find these limits can be helpful. Sometimes I think of the drum kit, or the anatomy of the body as a set of limits: and that these limits are ‘generous’. Maybe we could also think of this collection of concepts/lenses (ATTENTION, DISCREPANCY, MULTIPLICITY, ECOLOGY) together as an ideas-instrument, which will produce something particular, and slightly different, to another ideas-instrument.

TSB: We are talking a lot here about something which seems fundamentally bodily. Can you talk a bit about words, text, writing?

FROX: Well, as you know, I am a very particular character: not just a frog, but the leg muscle of a frog, and I have been used (by Helmholtz) to mediate electrical impulses to communicate physiological response times to stimuli. So, I am very much grounded in the idea of fundamentally bodily. But I also feel how words (a sort of measurement?) affect me, as a body, muscle, organism.

In a roundabout but sort of practical sense, in relation to this project, and words, I can say: the primary way I try to find out a bit more about the subjects of ATTENTION, DISCREPANCY, MULTIPLICITY, ECOLOGY, is by playing the drums. Sometimes this means I am sitting down at a drum kit, moving my arms and legs to excite drum membranes using sticks or other ‘beaters’. Other times, I do the drum kit playing by listening to music (sometimes other drummers playing), or reading, or talking with other people. Sometimes this other activity, talking to other people or reading a book, for example, might seem to be about something quite different from the ‘topic’ of drumming. But somehow, it affects what happens, when I ‘play’ the drums. It affects how it feels, and what it sounds like.

TSB: Okay, that feels quite contrary. You use these ideas to learn about drum playing and music; and you play the drums to learn about those ideas in the musical situation?!

FROX: I know. But that’s how it feels – contrary, bi-directional, multi-way – and it seems to help get a better understanding, both in the body and in thinking.

TSB: I suppose like rhythms can be ‘poly-rhythms’?

FROX: I guess, yes.

TSB: But I feel that I still don’t understand how this relates to words: talking and writing and so on.

FROX: Well, I suppose alongside ‘the sitting down to play the drums activity’, to find out a bit more, and to try to go into some detail about all this in another way (through this ATTENTION, DISCREPANCY, MULTIPLICITY, ECOLOGY instrument), I spend time writing. I like to think of writing as anything that I am doing that is not playing the drum kit. Playing and writing grow together, in unpredictable and complex ways.

More notes on this that I just found:

Music growing in complex ways the body moving with music in complex ways the writing about music growing in complex ways writing as a collection of semiotic information, like music.

TSB: Feels like this has something to do with sharing.

FROX: Yes, which is communication I suppose. The need or desire for it. And my feeling relating to music is that the sort of growing-energy which music can have, can almost demand that there is this flow of communication, which persists across different ways of communicating: sounds, gestures, words... and so on.

TSB: A bit abstract, but...

FROX: I find, when the conditions allow it, that the writing process is sometimes very much like the music making process: quite unpredictable, unknown, organic. The sensation is somehow like the apprehension of little traces of meaning (a word, an idea, a feeling), which then accumulate into something more cohesive: a thing rather than a bunch of stuff. This thing might resemble a sound shape or an emotion or idea or mental image. It seems it must be something pretty ‘basic’ or primal:

By saying this now, it makes me think of the growth of a star or a planet: somehow once a thing begins to cohere, it develops gravity, and this gravity-energy engenders motivation, and more energy and more growth.

In these conditions for growth – of ideas, sounds, feelings – the thing (work? project?) proliferates new traces: new signs, feelings, stuff…

TSB: Hang on... stars? I’m lost again.

And how does this relate to those lenses or concepts you mentioned before, and how does this all relate to sounds and writing?!

FROX: Well, I suppose I’m saying that this whole process of exploring, which is motivated by pleasure, curiosity, or what we call in an academic context ‘research’, is a repetitive thing. A kind of orbiting around themes: sometimes using concepts to lead the body, sometimes using the body to lead ideas; and maybe both happening concurrently.

The same ‘questions’ about ATTENTION, DISCREPANCY, MULTIPLICITY, ECOLOGY – and many other aspects of the complex organic situation which is music, as it happens – are returned to, over and over again, proliferating more detail about the subject(s), but also many more critical questions.

TSB: Sounds exhausting!

FROX: Ha! It’s very much alive!

Returns, rotations, more planes to the lens-prism.

TSB: Prisms can focus and refract.

FROX: Exactly.

Day 2

A conversation, and later a performance named Frx6 (N) Rubs, Doublings And Wrenches (Draped Frame) taking place on Wednesday 28 June 2023, 8 p.m.:

TSB: So, following on from yesterday’s conversation, where we ended by trying to address writing, I think…

FROX: Yes, well, basically I tried a number of times to introduce this research project that Paul has been doing. The one which this conversation is sort of trying to address, introduce, advertise or whatever.

And a bit like I was talking yesterday about coming back to the same stuff (something about the quality of the feeling of musical playing, or one of the key concepts or whatever) through repetitions, prisms, concepts, to better understand it.

That is also what has happened with writing.

TSB: I see, but I’m still not totally clear what you mean.

FROX: Ok, so one example I guess, is that I’ve kind of wondered what it is exactly that I’m doing, what I might have been discovering. So, I thought I’d try and describe that to an imaginary audience (of friends), hoping that the writing might reveal something more distilled or refined.

But what happened each time was that I found myself describing something slightly different. Or at least that is what it felt like, to begin with. Like the writing each time was affected by whatever playing was happening ‘nearby’ or whatever particular imagined or real audience there might be for this introduction.

TSB: Do you have any more concrete examples? I think that might help me understand.

FROX: Well, yes, this was a first draft proposal I submitted earlier to the FORUM+ journal, in an attempt to welcome a potential audience to Paul’s project:

ADVERTISEMENT FOR SLIP or Soot Scratches towards attention.

This is an introduction to a project called WE GROW MUSIC!. The project – practical in nature, and therefore elusive, complex – needs bridges to write about it; this is one of those bridges.

So, this text makes use of words to write to you, to introduce the project, and simultaneously reflects on the way words can be used to bridge practical experience and abstract ideas (ideas, concepts, academic research, for example).

Or, ‘this is an advert for a forthcoming double vinyl record, CD and booklet, featuring recordings of a live music performance and attendant writing, which grows out from and encapsulates aspects of the research project introduced below’.

That is, what follows hopes to be a kind of welcome, or, a sort of alter-journal of some writing and activity emerging through the process of the thinking and doing and asking which constitute the ‘research’, or, something like, a number of versions of actual and speculative approaches to some conceptual and material conditions that might facilitate a kind of generosity, or, music.

That is, thank you, you have reached (soot) traces of ‘an alter-practice of ongoing-untraining’ engendered by the ‘no’ which was actually a ‘yes’ (in disguise).

TSB: Thanks for sharing. I found that a bit odd and obscure though, I have to say.

FROX: You are not alone!

TSB: But I am curious about this term you used ‘an alter-practice of ongoing-un-training’.

FROX: That was something which emerged over the last few years, when I thought: What is it I am actually doing!

It related to the thing we touched on yesterday: this ‘not exactly knowing what is going to happen’, and what relationship we might have to training, in the sense of being schooled.

TSB: How do you mean?

FROX: I suppose I’m getting at how we might play (or listen) to music depending on if or how we’ve been trained in a particular formal or philosophical approach.

And if we haven’t had any classical or ‘formal’ training – which I think to me usually means music school or working deep into a genre of music, then how or what do we practice.

TSB: This feels to me, in some unclear way, to have to do with ATTENTION. Would that be accurate?

FROX: I think so, yes, exactly. It definitely feels to me that ATTENTION is some tool we have which naturally mixes body/thought to approach practicing; a sort of sensitivity and presence which can allow something creative to grow.

TSB: Sounds a bit esoteric, I have to say!

FROX: Ha! I suppose, specifically, I mean that it can help us to keep finding both edges and gaps. If a particular way of doing things, a school or style is like a grid system, then I think another approach is to develop a practice to find gaps, cultivate variations, sort of bump or smear the grid, or put something very close, but not in order.

TSB: I know it’s boring when I keep saying this, but this is getting a bit abstract again, I think I need a break.

FROX: Apologies. At this point I usually try to move my body, in some way.

TSB: Time to dance?

FROX: I thought you’d never ask!

Day 3

A conversation, and later a performance named Frx7(N) Live Oatflake Temptation.B taking place on Thursday 29 June 2023, 8 p.m.:

TSB: I wanted to ask you: Why all the fragments or digressions? I suppose a more precise way to approach it, to connect to our conversation, would be that there are a few things I want to return to that we discussed yesterday: this un-training and the prisms.

FROX: Ok, well, first to respond to the fragments and what you call digressions. I guess you mean the other bits of writing I’ve shared? I suppose I think of all these materials: the writings and the ideas we’ve exchanged, and the new ones that all this has produced; as information. In the sense that the late (and brilliant) artist and curator Ian White would mean it. That with this information we can mobilise, and that all this different information, different angles on or details about the same or very similar stuff moves our understanding.

Sorry, that was a bit overly complicated. Maybe coming to the prisms is helpful: all this information, words, ideas, mental imagery, our ‘characterizations… are all planes on the prism.

TSB: Would bringing you back to music help us get some clarity?

FROX: I’m not sure, actually, clarity is what I want, but maybe the ongoing possibility of proliferation; which I guess is cloudy!

TSB: Which is sort of a response to un-training?

FROX: Yes. I think that the practice is about whatever gets fixed in the process of repetition and regularity or habit – that might pro/in/hibit or limit the possibility of proliferation and organic movement of sounds or ideas or physical movement – is being questioned, undone, un-trained.

Being a bit technical: due to the nature of embodiment, degrees of entrainment, my instinct is that ATTENTION is a great tool to try to stay on the edge of a kind of blind reproduction of gestures, sounds, styles, ideas. Awareness of this conditioning facilitates the attempt to open all that up and do something different.

TSB: Hmm, you’re very wordy today, and I’m getting a strong whiff of idealism… and I tried to get you back to music!

FROX: Ah, sorry, a bit of extra sunshine today. Vitamin D buzz. It’s been a long winter.

TSB: So anyway, what about the prisms. How does that – being a very definite and fixed thing – fit with negotiation of what you said a few days ago about complexity and structure?

FROX: I don’t want to get stuck on this, but...

Somehow, I think of how we can sort of deposit the prism in a stream of improvisation as a sort of compositional device. I’ve done this quite figuratively before in compositional diagrams. Just drawn a prism somewhere on the page.

Also, going back to what we’ve touched on yesterday: I’ve imagined that the bunch of lenses (concepts) – ATTENTION, DISCREPANCY, MULTIPLICITY, ECOLOGY – are like the sides or planes of a prism. Each plane (concept) exists as part of this whole lump of a thing, in relation the other planes (concepts). When we look through this prism placed in front of some matter we want to investigate, depending on the angle of rotation of the prism, the light creating the image of the matter is diffracted or collected differently, effecting the quality of the image of the matter. Does that make sense?!

TSB: Hmm, I’m a bit lost, to be honest. But I like the feel of this imaginary prism. And I like the rainbow colours that a prism can produce from sunlight.

FROX: Me too.

For some reason, I always come back to some mental image of a rotating prism. It feels like it has something to do with a rhythmic quality that I’m interested in.

At the same time, I think because the prism has all these simultaneous possible angles of approach, and all these ways of splitting up or concentrating ‘information’, it seems to suggest that however you approach exploring something, what questions you ask, where you are at this point in time, who you are... all this is to some degree contingent, and so the ‘answers’ will be provisional, partial, maybe fragmented.

TSB: Is this the MULTIPLICITY you’re talking about?

FROX: Trying something like that, I think!

TSB: So, if I understand something from all this: you are doing something (playing drums) and this doing something produces an understanding, which sometimes, you put into words.

FROX: Yes, sometimes writing feels like a process of proposing structures; dropping the prism into something in excess of what can be described, and giving it a spin. Then seeing what it sounds like, how it feels.

TSB: Prism dance.

FROX: Now who’s abstract?!

This all demonstrates something important actually: that the writings, descriptions, structuring conceptual frameworks, sounds, emotions… everything that constitutes both the music and the research, depending on where you are coming from… all these things continue to grow, to proliferate, to shift shape, texture.

So, it is important to think of this conversation as one stream, thread or channel of some entangled communication, of which the music, the sounds of the SLIP performances are another part, thread, angle. Information.

TSB: Okay.

FROX: To go back, or come ‘back’ around and to reiterate some cyclic or non-linear quality to all this; these are some of Paul’s notes, fragments of an attempt at an early introduction; trying, I think, to make a framework for the research:

WE GROW MUSIC!

During the process of the doing, which research actually is, a mix of new feelings, ideas and inscriptions continue to emerge. The collection of words which best frame and introduce the project mutate to adjust to this new scenario.

Below is a snapshot: description approach revision number two or three, or beyond; that is, some words ‘about’ a research project, or, an indication of what might be going on, and, definitely a trying to open a window.

SUBTITLE

Ecologies of attention, discrepancy and multiplicity – real and imaginary – in embodied music performance.

VARIOUS PROVISIONAL SHAPES OF AN INVITATION, REPEATED

Following my research on the emergence of sounds and signs,⁴ the subject of this project is a reconsideration of embodied music making as a complex ecology. These are based on listening as a mode of attention and used to investigate how performing bodies grow music and language—characterised by discrepancy and multiplicity.

AND/OR

The research listens to the aspects of discrepancy and multiplicity as specific generative features of embodied music making, primarily in the context of live experimental improvised music. This follows the idea of music making as an ecology, in which simultaneously real (material, sonic) and imaginary (subjective, embodied) music is grown. The project engages the challenge: how to access, explore and articulate features of the complex embodied music making process. The body is an ‘intricately coordinated crowd’ and ‘multiple’ but not ‘fragmented’. The project focuses in particular on the aspect of attention as a practical guide through this ‘crowd’.

TSB: That all feels very dry, wooden, pseudo-academic.

FROX: How rude! I think this is what Paul had written to try and encapsulate the work we hoped to do. What actually happened was that he did a few performances, and various things happened in our lives, which of course had an influence.

Anyway, I think this stuff about writing might be helpful:

[Paul’s notes continue]:

This project is realised through practice, including the practice of writing. I am starting from the provocation that writing is everything happening outside of the time-based performance of musical sounds.

Or,

I use an expanded sense of writing, borrowing the term ‘writing plus words,’ which includes the range of signs and symbols – from words to diagrammatic marks – relating, through symbolic inscription, to verbal language systems.

That is, all the semiotic, discursive activity, directly or indirectly contributing to the production of the emerging musical environment […]

It is obvious perhaps, but: the choice of words – concepts, terms: technical or poetic (ATTENTION, DISCREPANCY, MULTIPLICITY, ECOLOGY) – used to think through, describe and frame the project, change the nature and output of the research investigation and the feeling of any practical experiment.

TSB: I think you explained this earlier.

FROX: Sorry if this is getting boring…

TSB: I just want to hear some music now.

FROX: Okay, yes, me too, but I just want to share this last extended extract from Paul’s early project description because it mentions some of the things we’ve discussed, which is maybe helpful to illuminate some aspects of what you might hear in the recordings.

TSB: Okay, but I like to listen and feel first, to have my own ideas, thanks.

FROX: Okay. Well, for any other audience, here it is:

[Paul’s notes continue]:

It has been demonstrated that the musical environment (which includes preparations, performance and reception) is animated by polyvalent real and imagined elements. Taking just one aspect of this as an example: in the context of the embodied sense of temporality and musical timing, multiple oscillating rhythms make up organism and environment, through a mix of an internal ‘endogenous timebase’ (pulse, heart, brain) and ‘external’ (gestural and environmental) rhythms.

The musical environment is an ECOLOGY consisting simultaneously of moving bodies, imaginative ideas, and sonic vibrations. The music emerging from this ecology is always situation specific: contingent on, co-produced by performer(s) and context.

DISCREPANCY is used to imply movement, dynamism, and critically challenge standards, processes of normalization, as well as raise questions of perceptual filtering and subject constitution. The concept of MULTIPLICITY exemplifies a condition of proliferation which is key to developing living, growing and accessible music.

The subjective perception of musical experience has been described as an attentional practice. I engage with an expanded conception of listening to include both the conventional ‘outward’ sense, where we listen to music, with our ears, to the environment, and the organized sounds which may occur within it; the ‘internal’ sense of the registration of the subjective sensations of what we understand as our body (e.g. pulse, heartbeat, breath), in reaction to the same musical environment.

TSB: So, before I jump into the sounds, could you give us some sort of conclusion?

FROX: Well, conclusions are something I’m particularly uninterested in, maybe even refuse. But I can do something else in the form of some sentences.

TSB: How pretentious! Ha!

FROX: Ha! Well, as a prelude to the sounds, some more notes about this project that Paul and I wrote and thought together:

Ideas are collections of travelling vibrations. All the ideas which flow through this research, congeal, release or stick – at any given time – serve as an invitation, some ingredients, a start point, and an excuse – to provoke some action.

The action this project tries to stimulate is to begin to practically articulate and question some of what already happens, when we perform: that is play, listen to, write, and imagine, music.

The body of the performer – engaged in the specific dynamic physical and semiotic play that music performance necessitates – is the site of an ongoing dynamic mix of tension and generative growth between registers of language and modes of consciousness and communication.

It is not only the body which is already multiple (plural), but the context (environment) in which the body is situated. That is, the body is already a collaboration: an ongoing embodied process of transition and translation between sound and sign, animating emerging music.

It is this practice that continues to reveal that everything in the project – material developments, conceptual architecture, theoretical administration (ideas, taxonomies, claims), aesthetic outcomes – are a set of mutable fictions.

These fictions are approached as partialities – friendly fragments, like sections of an optical lens or prism – catalytic characters who offer new ways of re-considering what has been discovered. These fictions – as characters – are interrogated, encouraged; played with, and listened to: through embodied experimental and improvised musical play.

End

The power of music is in its participatory discrepancies, and these are basically of two kinds: processual and textural. Music, to be personally involving and socially valuable, must be ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune.’ […] Put another way, wherever ‘lexical meanings’ are various and ambiguous for a particular phenomenon, one can assume a lot of collective and individual unconsciousness and conversely a greater power for ‘speaker’s meanings’ to define situations.⁵

+++

Paul Abbott

is a musician and drummer. He plays with real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing Paul has performed at venues and festivals internationally. He was resident artist at Cafe OTO 2015 & 2023. In 2022 he completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Florian Hecker and Nikki Moran, and is currently undertaking research at Royal Conservatoire/Academy Fine Arts Antwerp. He was a co-founder and co-editor of Cesura//Acceso journal for music, politics and poetics.

paulabbott.net

Footnotes