There's a video up of a performance I did with Cavan Fyans, Adam Parkinson, Shiori Usui at the Bongo Club in Edinburgh.
We had 2 days to put together an improvised, electronic performance with new people. Our practise focussed around trying to have "musical" interactions while using the laptops. So, we worked on listening exercises, and structures which helped us to keep a sense of space and identity while playing.
In the concert, we used a single loudspeaker each, to keep the idea of the laptops as individual instruments, although Shiori's vocals could appear from any of them at different times. We played 2 "pieces", based on simple forms:
- in the first piece, we played very short sections, around 1 minute long, where one performer would start, then two more would join in. The fourth person would sit out, sometimes sampling the output of the others. The active players would try to bring each segment to an end as soon as the idea was expressed. The next segment would be started by the person sitting out, generally drawing on some material from the previous segment as a starting point.
- for the second piece, we chose a selection of images to use, and ahead of time divided up different aspects of the images between the performers. We did this in a fairly loose way - it could be about colour, shape, foreground/background, a specific part of the image etc. We'd then play the image roughly from left to right, as a way to keep some structure in the piece.
It's quite sparse - purposefully so - but there are some great moments in there.