A continuous 36-hour improvised performance recorded live at Supernormal festival 2011 (Braziers Park, Oxfordshire). No loops, no sleep, maximum music. Released 15 years to the day and hour.
Instigator, Kev Nickells, drove the performance with the following premise: ''My basic proposition: what happens when musicians enfeebled by sleep deprivation try to play?'' The musicians involved were Kev Nickells himself, Seth Cooke, Clive Henry, Jamie Glew-Osborn, Huw Webb and Barnabas Yianni. The following instruments were made available: guitars, violin, percussion, drums, piano, sax, clarinet, toy piano, glockenspiel, ukulele, voices. Apparently these players were joined by random festival goers from time to time.
It seems to me you can engage with this kind of colossal amount of material in one of two ways. Either you take a purist approach and attempt the entire 36 hours in one sitting or, errr, you don't. Dipping into one of the 108 twenty minute tracks on Bandcamp yields interesting surprises. You'd think perhaps a project such as this might have a similar appeal to the prospect of a 36 hour Christopher Nolan film, such is the unavoidable commitment to the concept of time, but letting the whole thing run in the background as you go about your day offers the pleasant auditory experience of attending a Supernormal festival - the microphones pick up as many passing conversations as improvisational gambits. Alternatively, you could try a week of daily 5-hour sessions, or one track a day for
an entire season perhaps. I’d go with Winter; to give me a reminder
of the pleasure of attending a summer festival.
Kev Nickells has previous experience with long-duration projects; a solo 36-hour improvised piano recital in Bristol which predated (I think) this Supernormal performance, and participation in The Long Half Day; a 12 hour improv collaboration in Brighton also involving Benedict Taylor, Noura Sanatian, Tim Yates, Adam Bushell, Dan Powell and Chris Parfitt. Nickells says this;
''I had wanted this to remain a transient experience for the festival-goers; after 15 years though the threat of bit-rot leads me to make the record public and available. By necessity this is improvised music; the sextet hadn't played together before, though I'd played with everyone in some capacity. My basic proposition: what happens when musicians enfeebled by sleep deprivation try to play? This release is the answer - again by necessity, it's often not entirely compelling; surprisingly often it's great. My memory is that consciousness slips out from between your eyes and into your hands and ears.''
The album is offered as a download for £3.60, making it 10p per hour of music, which I think makes it a pretty sweet deal.
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