Nil at Dear Serge
Me and Chris tried our new approach for Nil at Dear Serge on Saturday. We’ve decided to focus our attention on the things we like most, the sounds that sound right together to us and the theme we’ve gone back to again and again – ritual. Chris has been making some beautiful scores using a mix of media which we used at Dear Serge; I need to get working on something similar.
We brought far less each to play, rather stripped down from the usual assortment of junk, instruments and kitchen implements. Chris concentrated on reeds although diverted sparingley into objects as needed. I used my tuned percussion, ektara and voice. We also sat behind a table rather than on the floor, our knees just can’t take it any more.
The score gave a nice structure, even if it was more of a signalling device at times. We decided afterwards that we need to reintroduce some of the performance elements which got dropped. One of the reasons we started to change things is we were tired of being labelled as a couple of jokers, but there’s still space for the playful, rather than the downright silly.
