Towards the end of 2023, I became close with Josie Silverman, an artist working in UK dance music scenes under the alias “MIDRIB”. Our first interaction based on sound, outside of our usual practice of DJing, was a women’s only noise and sound making session that she organised at Premise studios.
The entire session was undocumented, as we felt as though it would be invasive to have a camera or audio recording device monitoring us for the few hours that we were there. Josie initiated the session with the intent of using sound as a therapeutic tool, using sound to release and abstractify trapped emotions. Quantum theory states that “observation affects reality”, meaning that when a proton, or particle, is observed, its behaviour is changed. Based on this, we can understand observational devices, such as that of a camera or audio recording device, to affect the quality and authenticity of any sound produced within this session.
Four of us participated in the session; Josie used korg volcas, another person used an accordion, and another person had a few different synthesisers I didn’t recognise. I brought along the loop and granular pedals I had been experiementing with independently. There was a bass guitar and an sm58 microphone that were used by all of us. Everything ran into a mixing desk, and we had a different person opperate the mixing desk in rotation, with the person in that role able to control what sounds could be heard and at what level. We also sat down to meditate together, and discussed relevant litterature to our interests; Josie introduced me to the book Music, Emotion and Trancing- Deep Listeners by Judith Becker.
Having known Josie for a while now within the DJ scenes that I opperate in, it was refreshing to immerse ourselves in an abstract, non-musical sound making process.
Our second non-DJ based sound interaction was at her house in February, where we had planned to make some dance music tracks, but instead, had a 40 minute experimental jam session. I brought my flute and my SP-555, and Josie was using a guitar, pedals, and for a small amount of time, a drum machine. The process felt to be cathartic, with most of the sounds not making sense. We were simply releasing a sense of “detunedness” within ourselves. But although a lot the sounds didn’t make sense, there were some parts of the session that sounded pleasing to the ear, and had a sense of musicality. We decided to extract some of these small ideas, and do what we had originally planned to do- create a dance music track.
It was still experimental in nature, using a sound that wa played on the bass guitar as the “kick drum”, and then not using any other percussive elements.
Overall, this proved to be a much more enjoyable method of creating music. There was an artistic process behind it which involved improvisation, allowing us to immerse ourselves within our instruments that we may not typically use, and to become much more emotionally connected to the project. The outcame gave us a plethora of samplabale material, and a rhyhmic (yet lacking in percussiveness) dance track that could potentially be played in the rave if it were to go through mixing and mastering processes. It was also nice to be able to enjoy a more artistic method of creating music at the same time as one thats more closely tied to my practice as a DJ in rave spaces.
This made me think again of my installation at Gallery 46 last year, where I created a film called Circular Intersections, exploring the idea of the art world and underground music scenes, particuarly the dance music scene, as being interconnected. It is important for me to develop this idea into something more solid, where I can conceptualise this idea. I am going to do this with a new research project entitled “exploring the interspace”, where I will explore, document, and create spaces where the art world and underground music spaces can coexist, building communities surrounding these spaces.
