BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
For Dan O’Connor, the function of a musician’s breath is as significant as the sound it produces through the instrument. In his solo debut IN/EX, Dan uses individual breaths to create improvised ‘micro-compositions’. He draws on the limits and capabilities of the breath to craft imaginary worlds of sound using his trumpet.
The muso will also release his newest project orphans this month, and we chat with him about the work he has created so far.
Hi Dan, congratulations on your solo debut IN/EX. Tell us the whole story.
I was listening to a lot of improvised music of long duration – the kind where the musicians let themes and textures unfold and develop at their own pace. I really love that music; works by Peter Evans and Nate Wooley, for example. I then became curious as to how short an improvisation could be whilst still possessing all the interesting elements of the longer kind such as form, development, and a cohesive statement. So I started to explore this lower limit of duration.
Probably because I’m a trumpet player and the breath is integral to the system, it seemed a perfect natural limiter of improvisational duration. Everyone has an innate sense of how much air they have inside them, and when they’ll need to take another breath, so it really helps the player shape a short improvisation. Rather than considering an external clock source, you can feel how much time you have left to play. It also makes what you play have an impact on duration. Expelling a lot of air on a given sound is going to shorten the piece, for example. The more I thought about the single breath, the more characteristics of it made sense as a durational limiter.
You’ve really focused on this idea of space, breath, room for sound. Why do these subtleties resonate with you? Would you call them subtleties?
I don’t think I’d consider space and breath subtleties. Breath is so integral to all sound on trumpet – not to mention life. I’d say that breath and space draw the listener into the subtitles of those sounds and the music. To be really cliched, space and breath in performance give the music a chance to breath.
I also think that the listener’s breath becomes apparent given the space. The sound of one’s own breath is not often paid much attention. The silences in the album are so stark that I hope the listener’s breath would have nowhere to hide and thus become somewhat part of the experience. It can end up at a meditative place if you’re in the right frame of mind.
You’re a trumpet player, so I expect bias in this next question – and that’s ok! But please explain to us why the trumpet is the perfect instrument to convey these sounds and ideas.
The trumpet is an amplifier of the vibration of the lips, the sound of the breath and other interesting mouth noises. It really just puts out what you put into the mouthpiece, but makes it sound more pleasant. So obviously, the breath is its engine, it doesn’t function without it. Besides that, it’s perfect for me because I am a trumpet player and I hear the sounds in my head as trumpet sounds, as cliched as that notion is.
I’m keen to hear other people apply the one breath improvisation concept to their own instrument. I know Shani Holmes, Australian vocalist, did a series of one breath improvisations. I do wonder if it would be an effective technique for a non-wind instrument – would a piano player be interested in doing this?
What was the recording process like? Specifically, I’m interested in the nature of ‘micro-compositions’ and improvisations in the studio. I assume none was notated, so every take sounded entirely different?
I recorded this in my studio; it gave me a lot of time to try things. I did about 10 one-hour sessions of sitting and recording one-breath improvisations. Initially, there was little compositional consideration before each breath. I guess this was the experimentation phase of the recording, though some of the first breaths made the album. The initial sessions possessed an excitement and tension stemming from my confrontation of the new concept. So I’d take a breath, play a one breath improvisation, reset and go again.
Along with the non-composed sessions, I started focusing on simple ideas that could take place over the breath. For example, I experimented with moving a single valve from the up to down position over the duration of the breath. I guess you could think of these as micro-compositions. Most of these micro-compositions were based on mechanics, another session was covering and uncovering the open third valve slide. The idea was not really to practise and perfect the compositional idea, but see what it produced and work with that.
The single-breath pieces themselves remained intact, as they were played in the room. So the stitching-together was on the album scale, rather than within tracks. I compiled the most compelling takes into the album, adding the 10-second silences between improvisations. I spent a lot of time contemplating how long the silence between the tracks should be. A nice, even 10 seconds seemed to work for me.
You also did the artwork for this release while recording the album.
I did the artwork at the same time as the recording; moving back and forth between the visual art and the music was refreshing. I tried to reflect the recording process in the painting/drawing process. I had three wooden painting panels that I filled with black lines and shapes, only ever viewing the work through a small cardboard-framed window. The artwork as a whole was hidden from me as I created it – the idea being that the small window through which I was drawing was like the single breath, which would go on to be part of the larger album.
What was the concept behind your upcoming release orphans? The title for this album is telling.
orphans started a few years ago with Behn Greene (drums) and Dom Barrett (guitar) who I know from study at WAAPA. The name orphans refers to the small melodic fragments we would improvise and develop. The fragments were lone ideas, unattached, and we’d bring them together over the course of a piece and give the ‘orphans’ a home, so to speak.
We improvise together, discuss narratives that we can evoke with the music, and we’ve done this for a few years. It’s great playing with Behn and Dom because we’ve developed a few little structures and techniques that we can move in and out of, working with or against each other.
What is the narrative?
We’d gone to Ron Pollard’s Studio Sleepwalker’s Dread in North Dandalup WA, and recorded for a day. So we had about four hours of material to sift through and craft a story. That turned out to be as involved a creative process as the recording itself; a greater task than we had first thought.
In our minds, it’s the journey of a person who gets swept up in strange, perhaps supernatural goings-on, which ultimately reveal to them a perspective on their own life that they hadn’t considered before. The character is left with an all-knowingness and the weight of future conflict.
If it’s best suited to one sitting, how does the music unfold over the course of the seven tracks?
Tension and release are a big part of the album, I think, and much of the tension is built through repetition of phrases or sounds that rub against everything around them. To get a sense of this, it is best to listen through the whole thing. Some of the tracks function to build tension which isn’t really released until the following track. Given this, the effectiveness of each track is somewhat dependant on what comes before and after.
On top of this, the narrative is very important to us – a large part of creating the album – and the listener’s invention of their own narrative to the music is encouraged. We’d like to hear from people who have listened start to finish and could weave a story through it.
What’s on the horizon?
On the immediate horizon is the orphans release through my music label Tone List, which I run with Josten Myburgh, Jameson Feakes and Ben Leeming. And a little further down the track, a few new works from creative Perth musicians which I’m not playing on but I’ll help with, in my role at Tone List.
I have many ideas, I write them down and I hope I will get to all of them one day.
Click here to find out more about Dan and his music. orphans will be released on August 25 with a launch gig at Paper Mountain in Perth. Learn more about Tone List here.
Images supplied.
