Improvisation is a curious act. It implies a deviation from the norm to encounter the unexpected. Our behavior might combine both routine and improvised behavior. Improvisation is often thought of as creative. Yet, improvisation might force us into disobedience or madness. Somewhere between the norm and the unexpected, we might find a new path on our journey.
In the studio of Peter Wetzler, improvisation is a weekly ritual between two musicians. Together, he and a musician friend, Peter Einhorn, invent a new language without rules or by challenging rules. I’m invited one evening to video their improvisational session and to participate in my own way: to improvise a short documentary piece about them and with them.
When I arrive, I enter a visually cluttered space, The musicians are staged apart from each other in the room. Power and microphone cables snake along the floor to the computer, positioned next to two electric keyboards. On a small table sits a laptop computer on which Peter W. will record tonight’s session.
The sounds they are generating move from their mic’d instruments, recorded on multiple tracks and sent to amplified speakers that fill the room. It’s a full sound experience with a blend of acoustics and amplified electronics. Later, Peter will give me a final mix of the improv, equalized and blended into one recording. From here, I will create a piece of my own, trying to sync my meandering visuals with their seemingly random and sometimes inharmonious sounds.
Into the second recording, I begin to grasp what real improvisation requires: knowing the rules of musical patterns and venturing off the path of harmony. As I relax into the session, I find myself with my camera wandering around the room, trying to find out which sounds were coming from which instrument. Hence, the occasional close ups of their hands playing instruments. Back in my studio with a recorded soundtrack, I realize that their music may not require visual imagery: that without the video the sound may be more provocative of more fanciful imagery. A kind of musical abstract expressionism.
As I reflect on this, I realize that my documentary mind is part of one mind that needs more than a record of an event, not just an added narrative that explains away what they are doing. The Eye of the Whirlwind is to mix up the two realms. Yes, I feel a strong impulse to capture their musical dexterity and narrative about what they are doing in these weekly sessions. Yet, I have this deep urge to capture it differently: to bring to it a new connotation.
Several days later I edit my first version entitled Improvised at the Moment, converting color to black and white to mute the visual clutter of the space and focus on their playing. I overlay the session with their narrative, which I recorded a week later.
Unsatisfied with this edit, several days later I’m sitting on the ridge in the woodland near my house, surrounded by the beauty of light and leaf patterns in early spring. I feel the breeze creating improvised movement is the leaf shapes. I take my iPhone and wander off the path under the lower canopy of trees. The feeling is exhilarating comparable to the music. I return to my studio and sync the music with this unexpected visual. In so doing, this improvisation offered a new insight into the realm of music that the musicians may not have intended. A new video is born: Spring Intervals.