Improvising Live is SCARY (and cool)

Last weeks gig... the internal run down.

Last week I performed at a monthly electronic/ambient event in Collingwood. It was my first gig since having our second kiddo and for the first time in my life I basically did no preparation to play in front of people. Coming from a classical background, I haven’t been able to shake the perfectionism until recently. I’ve often gotten that “success” feeling from preparing something well, and then playing it exactly as I prepared it. But for this, I wrote a few little ideas on my synthesiser and had a random number generator tell me which idea to work with… and that was it.

I called each idea an “island”. I can’t remember where I read someone else doing this but it really stuck with me as something to try. It gave me a bit of structure and a bit of certainty in 30 minutes of uncertainty.

My mind was kind of loud the whole set anyway., I would love to do more of this to see what my creativity can do when my mind is quietly trusting the journey.

The set started off as it usually does for me, with my heart pounding in my ears and me trying to use my breath through the clarinet to calm everything down. My mind was saying “I want to be in the zone” but I wasn’t yet. My mind was saying “i want these sounds to mean something” and they weren’t meaning anything yet. I think I had an idea of how i wanted things to sound about 5 minutes in… but what I’d already settled into wasn’t that. Working with my loop pedal things were kind of set in stone so I kept going. And in that “keeping on going” that’s where things started to get into a flow.

My mind said a lot during this set… It said

• “is this boring?”

• “what next?”

• “I need to change this now”

• “slow down”

• “speed up”

• “shit i should have done a few more practice sessions on my clarinet”

but when it was quiet I found pure joy in the unknown.

You can hear this improv here. You can even purchase it if you would like. I only posted the second half of the set due to my clarinet pick up breaking up a bit in the first half (annoying!)

Hope you’ve all had a fabulous 2025, see y’all next year!