More free CDs
Remember SE1, the free Improvizone CD from 2007 that we dished out to promote the gigs? I'm working on two more such free CDs right now.

One disc will contain the majority of our 28 May 2008 gig at Ember, our last one in that venue to date, in which Mike, Os, the Laffsta and I fabricated a good hour and a half of presentable material. I posted one download fairly early on (this one) of what was effectively the soundcheck. I quickly deemed the whole thing to be usable pretty much from start to finish, which is why I have not posted any more downloads from it since. Until a couple of weeks ago, that is, when I began thinking in concrete terms about mixing it for a CD and realised there was too much. That's OK, there was a bit in the middle I didn't like so much, though it had a good beginning. So I uploaded that just before Christmas. The remaining hour or so needs a little cleanup here and there, some mixing adjustments, otherwise I'm going to leave most of it as it is, warts and missed beats and all.

So that's one CD, seventy minutes of minimally edited material from as much of a complete Improvizone gig as will fit on one disc. It gets nice and hairy and crazy somewhere in the middle, meaning we're not quite at chocolatey Café del Mar wife-friendly status just yet with this album, but as a whole, I think it's really good.

The other CD I have planned is going to represent the state we often end up in when we play to an attentive audience and let our hair down a bit. The ambient atmospherics are there, but at times the rhythm section play a bit harder. The common features of this kind of material tend to be that it comes from gigs at the Plough in Walthamstow and features Nick Cottam on bass. Nick is the only one with properly long hair to let down, really. Thus, this CD will probably be a Plough collection (mostly unused bits from our 05 Dec 2007 gig there), though I do have one other drum-n-bass rock-out I might include from Imbibe, which had the Laffsta plucking the cables, plus guitarist James Hender doing some stunning, completely non-ambient-chillout fret sprints.

One question has arisen in my head around the Ember CD. Should I split long pieces into separate the tracks, fading one out before the other begins, or should I glue the whole gig into one seventy minute piece?

My answer to the first would be, to hell with it, glue the whole thing together. The trouble is that people, myself included, very seldom have an entire 70-minute free period to listen to music, and that assuming they end up ripping the CD onto their mp3 player, which I have no problem with, many mp3 players have no fast forward or location memory facility. Nobody will ever get past the first five minutes, and will curse me from their office desks as they are forced, yet again, to cease playing and field another call from that pesky IT recruitment agent menace.

On the other hand, I like the idea of presenting the whole lot to put on and forget about. The music is, after all, intended to be background music, and presenting it in one long blobule might encourage people to use it as such. I may adopt the compromise of producing the Ember CD with one very long track, then maybe making them available chopped-up as mp3s separately when we've got rid of all the copies. The rockier CD will comprise separate pieces from different gigs, so those will be logically separate.

As with SE1, once again the CDs will be free, but the recordings are not for the downloads list, they are for people who come to the gigs. We won't be dishing out copies in shops as posh fliers this time, although the packaging for these will be card wallets, so they would be much better suited to being left around if we did.

At least one gig per month until the summer
I think I may have found a venue in London W1 for gigs in the first half of next year. It is to be found somewhere in that vertiginous picture I stole from Google Maps. The reason I stole it is because it is now history. The H-shaped building near the middle is the old Middlesex Hospital which closed three years ago and was knocked down last Spring.

W1 is an area of town where I really want us to be playing, though I have nothing really against Upper Walthamstow, where a few more evenings at the Plough playing ambient space rock would be nice too.

I plan to be settling on the core players of Mike and Os, with either Nick or the Laffsta on bass, depending on the venue.

E-drum software
This is my project to make a software drum machine that generates a slightly different sound sample each time I play a pad. I'm still tapping away at this application, and may or may not have something in operation by the time we next do a gig, though I've not devoted a huge amount of time to it, snatching a few half-hours here and there.

The approach I've taken thus far is to generate a sound in advance of it being played. The alternative is to generate it while it's being played, which a modern CPU is easily fast enough to do, but which could give me a headache when I'm trying to play four sounds at once.

Generating in advance is not without its problems. I'm building up a queue of ready made sounds, but the that means I have to make sure a sound is available in time for when it needs to be played. One thing I've tried is to have a kind of revolving carousel of 20 or so sounds, re-generating ones I know have been played. If I don't get to regenerate them it doesn't matter, it just uses the previous sound. But I do have to make sure I'm not trying to play a sound from the queue at exactly the same time as I'm trying to regenerate it. One general deficiency of the queuing technique is that the software can't immediately respond to changes in velocity (how hard I hit the drum) in any way other than in volume. In theory I could assign a velocity (or any other modulation) change to one of the generation parameters, eg note length. But I woudn't hear the consequence of the changes until several sounds later.

So I might try on-demand generation after all. Also, I can add more sound generation techniques over time as an ongoing enhancement project. Plus I could take up Os's offer of help turning it into a VST plugin. Plenty to do on this, in other words. Another idea would be to make the GUI as interesting as possible to watch, and use it as one of the evening's video projection sources.

It will have to be fairly damn interesting though, to compete with some of my slowed-down phone-camera studies of the lower ground floor of the Pompidou Centre. I mean, come on...

I know this because I've been doing a few time-lapse video shoots recently, one of this year's ideas for enhancing Improvizone gigs. Now that we'll soon be scraping out the last chewy bits stuck to the bottom of 2008, I thought I would have a look back on a year in which, compared to 2007, I don't appear to have done much.

Gigs
In 2007 we did 12 gigs, and I posted downloads from all except one. In 2008 we did only seven, from three of which I have not yet posted anything at all, and from one of which I only posted a single download months later. I'd like to say that we did fewer gigs of greater quality, but that would not really be true. I will be putting my fingers on a few of the reasons why we played less this year below, but it's worth noting that my favourite gig of this year really was one of the best Improvizones to date.

Last year I recorded almost all of the gigs. This year Os did almost all of the recording, and it was a huge help not to have to record while trying to play, though I can still have fun looming-together unnecessarily long bunches of cables.

Downloads
Fewer gigs have inevitably resulted in fewer downloads this year, 21 compared to 52 in 2007. I posted 19 in just over four months in 2006 and we weren't even gigging at that point. When I was talking about gigs just now I may have given the impression that some were not of downloadable quality. That would be unfair. In one case, the gig was so good I didn't want to waste any of it on downloads. It's heading for a free CD next year. More on that soon. In other cases, if I don't want to upload stuff, it's not necessarily because it was no good, but because it wasn't representative of the ambient chillout bar music that I can play to the wife approach that I think we need to get us into bars in Central London. A fun two hours of space-rock-jamming is, sadly, just fun.

Periods of idleness
Ah yes. Between 15 Jan and 23 May 2008 we did nothing. No gigs. I posted a few downloads from 2007. Then, from 06 Aug to 07 Oct we did nothing, and have done nothing since then either. Let me explain.

Firstly, I really am quite lazy. Last year I was busy busy busy mixing downloads and blogging and posting listings to ents sites and... stuff. I guess at some point I looked back, saw little more than an growing numbers on the site stats and thought... prffffffff. In fact, we were due to be very busy during the first half of 2008, with a fortnightly residency booked in Ember in Farringdon from January through to May. That went up in smoke when Ember had a serious fire this time last year and were months in repair. We did go back in May 2008 with a view to reviving our residency, but I witnessed their apparent loss of clientele and assumed it would take them a while to recover. Anyway, instead of doing gigs for the first half of the year, I wrote software to help me compile video projections.

We resumed gigging in the summer, including a fun slot at the Design museum, a great gig that did exactly what was required, but was rather dull to listen back to. After a few more at the Plough, we took a break while Mike Bearpark, Steve Bingham and I went off to rehearse for three No-Man gigs in late August/early September. Those were terrific fun and a thrill to do. In a way, I didn't want to bother with much after that.

But Improvizone had one more date in the diary, for the Woodford Festival, on 07 Oct 2008 at Switch. I've now listened back to almost all of this and will be posting some downloads soon, because although I was worse than indifferent to this gig at the time, it does have some beautiful moments. Os and Mike were cruising nicely, but the rhythm section were definitely on an off-day.

Leaflets in Walthamstow
You know what, I had completely forgotten about this until I started putting together this list just now.

I had 5000 leaflets distributed door-to-door within walking distance of the Plough, alerting locals to two imminent Improvizone gigs. A necessary experiment, but largely a waste of money. One problem was almost certainly my leaflet design. It should have described the music as the main heading, then named Improvizone second. Potentially interested people will have some idea of what ambient chillout music might be. Except for the extremely unlikely case that they've already heard of us, they won't have a clue what Improvizone means. So, next time I book gigs at the Plough, I will have another go at the leaflet. And if it doesn't work that time, I'm definitely not repeating it.

Another problem was that I had no idea our gigs would coincide with major redecorating at the Plough. We had no posters up to confirm what people might have seen on their leaflets, and if they weren't regulars they would probably have thought the place was closed.

Video projections
The moment we started doing projections in the Plough, they changed the whole fabric of Improvizone gigs and I knew we were onto something cool. The audience now had something much more interesting than our dimly-lit profiles to look at, and when the screen was visible from the door, it has reasonable pulling power for getting people in to watch us.

In the absence of any recent can-do offers to take over the visuals, I've had plenty of fun putting some together myself this year. One idea I had originally was to do time-lapse imagery, initially by downloading weather satellite images, progressing to speeding up video shot on my camcorder, and then to taking individual frames using a webcam and my own capture software on the laptop. I sorted out the technicals for this instead of organising any gigs earlier in the year.

I then spent all summer learning about the practicalities of powering a laptop with a solar panel, so that I could leave it running somewhere not necessarily in the house to take time-lapse pictures over several hours. I spent a lot of time working on my laptop in the back garden on sunny days, looking at how the solar panel behaved and what batteries I needed. The electricals are the topic of a whole other blog, but for now, it's winter and I'm finally getting round to making time-lapse videos of the sky, using a fairly expensive webcam clamped onto the drainpipe from my bathroom sink. Annoyingly it's too cold to leave it there permanently, because it condenses over on the inside of the lens.

The weeks pass and I'm finding it very difficult to get the perfect time-lapse study: dawn to dusk on an intermittent-cloudy day. For the first time in my life, I am constantly checking the BBC weather to see if a good time-lapse candidate is forecast in the next few days. They're aren't many suitable days, and I usually miss them. This is either because when a good day is forecast, it is too soon after the last one, and the feeble winter sun has not yet taken its requisite days and days to recharge the batteries. Or it's because the forecast wasn't accurate enough. The number I've missed because the forecast was off... dear oh dear.

For example, today was forecast for heavy cloud, which is very boring to photograph, and even if I wanted, there would not be enough sun to keep the batteries going all day. And yet, stone me if I haven't just looked round at 7.45am to see a practically clear sky.

Argh.

That could work very well. But first, we need a recharge. The four of us have played together several times, we've come up with some truly terrific stuff, and plenty of good things happened at this gig. And yet, I did not think much of it. It seemed to me we played well enough, but with none of the wonder or excitement from when we were first getting together and improvising cool things live. As Mike later put it, once more without feeling.

The first person I blame for this is myself. If I have one platinum rule for improvising in groups of musicians, it is keep each other interested. And yet I've barely programmed any new patches in my electronic drum kit since we started doing gigs in Feb 2007. However well I may be able to tell them apart through headphones, the patches I do have are all starting to sound the same through my amp. I need to come up with some surprises, and I've known this for a long time. For a while my approach was, take the same set of sounds and treat it with different effects to make them sound unrecognisable. This works in principal, except it means that by the time I get to a point of familiarity with my effects setup, it's probably time to change it.

The first thing I have to stop messing around with and settle on a proper technique is using a delay. When I have a good delay and a click properly in sync with each other, it's fantastic. When they disagree, it's a nightmare, and all I want is to be at home with a book and a brandy. When Os first started supplying me with a click track, I was either controlling my delays by typing numbers into a delay plug-in in Cubase, or setting them with the wheel on my Ensoniq DP4, both to the nearest millisecond. This worked very well when he and I agreed a tempo numerically, when I would look up a corresponding delay using my quick HTML page to convert bpm to ms delay time.

It definitely does not work if I start playing and leave Os to work out the bpm, especially now that I have regressed to controlling delays with an ancient Alesis Microverb, whose delay time I can only set to the nearest 20ms. This would be fine if I controlled the tempo and could simply start playing. But Os has to tap in the tempo for my click, which he does not monitor himself, and which I don't think he can adjust once it starts. It's never exactly right, and now I have a delay that I can't fine-tune, a mismatching click, meanwhile the rest of the band has started playing to me, because they know nothing about the click in my earphones.

You can hear this in the video Os took. We more or less get away with it, but the delay is too fast for the click, and there's nothing I can do about it. Oh, and listen especially for my very junior left foot missing a beat in a really nasty way at 3:26. After that it gets better and turns into quite a nice piece, but I can constantly hear the push-pull of the pulse as I try and serve the delay time and the click tempo, and occasionally scratch my nose. Especially obvious problems kick in at 5:09 when Os begins a half-tempo groove he sampled from me. It locks exactly with his click, but against my delays feels way behind the beat.

Blah and blah, excuses ad infinitum, what I really need is a breath of clean fresh air into my drum setup, which is the original subject of this article. I want a set of interesting drum sounds that are going to be variable enough without me having to resort to delays, and that are going to be a step away from my current set of programmed patches. One thing that has always irritated me about electronic drum manufacturers is their obsessive attempts to achieve the most realistic drum sounds possible. I don't want this. If I wanted real drums I'd bring a real kit. What I really want is fun sounds that don't resemble drums at all. And I want an easy way of mutating the sounds so they will always be unique.

Almost a year ago I had the idea of making some analogue effects using VCOs and bits to generally wreck the drum sound. I got a little way into it and almost assembled something onto veroboard. But playing with analogue electronics in an age when we all program stuff into computers is like having a wrist watch that needs a power supply.

Earlier this year in the spring I enjoyed some success with delving into video creation in C++, for projecting onto backdrops at Improvizone gigs. Fast-forward to the present, and I'm doing time-lapse photography using a webcam and my own capture software running on a laptop powered by solar electricity in my shed. This is a whole other chapter, about which I will go into more detail another time. Suffice to say I was reasonably successful with that project, which in turn gave me the idea of using C++ for randomly generating WAV files of weird drum sounds for loading into my Roland SPD-S sampler. I might have bothered to get further with this were it not such a crushing bore to load WAV files into my SPD-S. So a few weeks ago I had the idea of abandoning the WAV file approach, and writing software that would play randomly generated drum sounds in response to MIDI note-on messages. I would make my own control panel that would be easy to use with a couple of fingers of one hand that is also holding a drumstick.

The obvious route would be to write a drum synth plugin for Cubase, which I have used live as my MIDI sound generator. I may do this eventually, but I don't really like Cubase, and most MIDI-related software does not satisfy the requirement of being easy to control live with two drumsticks in your hands. Also, I like an opportunity to learn a few things when I write software... in this case, how MIDI and audio works in Windows, plus some practice at multi-threading (coders know what that means, the rest of you are lucky). The nice thing about C++ on Windows is that it's the language of the operating system, and many sound/MIDI tools available in their native form. They're not necessarily beautifully documented, but if you're prepared to poke around in the MSDN and try their Multimedia stuff, you'll find all the ingredients. The nasty thing about working in (unmanaged) C++ is that the GUI (Graphical User Interface) tools are really dated and clunky. Nobody uses C++ for GUIs these days unless they absolutely have to.

Anyway, I'm happy to say I've got somewhere with this project. It is the first time I've ever found a use for the MIDI implementation chart in the back of a manual. In fact, the SPD-S manual tells me exactly which bytes mean what in the incoming MIDI data. The hard part so far has been playing sounds in Windows, using DirectSound. Oddly, the default procedure is to play a sample in a loop. You load your sample into a buffer, issue a start command, then DirectSound notifies you when you reach a specified point in the sample, eg the end, whereupon you issue a stop command. If you don't, it keeps playing the sample in a loop. I'm using one buffer per MIDI note, where a MIDI note corresponds to a drum pad on my kit. But I only have one notification method, so when I receive a stop command, I have a little bit of fun working out which buffer is the one I need to stop, since the sounds for each pad are not all the same length.

All that is just through the internal soundcard. Who knows what fun I have in store trying to get this (a) to play through the external soundcard and (b) to be recorded in Cubase. So long as we have Os, I don't need to worry about recording, and provided I've got a good effects unit, I don't need Cubase either. The advantage of playing through an external firewire soundcard is that I'd get better latency, but it's already pretty impressive on the laptop, ie inaudible. I haven't measured it yet.

Meanwhile, my approach for generating the samples is pretty much as it was back in the summer when I first tried creating WAV files. I started just with simple sinewaves, but now I'm moving towards generating several waveforms of different frequencies and either adding, multiplying or frequency-modulating them together. I'm then writing them to the DirectSound buffer rather than to a WAV file. The trick is, as the waveforms get more complicated to build, to have them prepared in a queue, rather than trying to generate them with each stroke, which is too slow. This limits the responsiveness to velocity and expression controls in real time... but I'll worry about that later. For now, I just want to cue up some interesting sounds.

The interesting bit is using random number generation to slightly vary the sounds each time. So although I'm hitting the same pad, the sound is never exactly the same each time. The next interesting bit is to get the sounds to mutate over a period of time, so that they gradually move from one group of settings to another over several minutes. All automatically, without me having to do anything.

Although I play on several tracks on SOTNMS, I feel impartial enough to be able to write about it, having had very little to do with making this music beyond turning up to my regular practice session in a rehearsal room in Tottenham Hale on Wednesday 16 April 2008 and flapping a couple of sticks up and down for a few hours. Hardly hard work for me.

Plenty of hard work has gone into this album though. The first thing that strikes me when I listen is the complexity of this work, relative to what you would expect from a group known for its ambient output. This is an album that Os has painstakingly put together out of Mike's guitar parts and his keyboard textures, and it's an approach that works really well. You get the Bearpark spontaneity and ingenuity that we're used to hearing live, and you get to hear what Os is capable of when he doesn't have to do live looping during a gig. There are organised chord and mood changes, and pieces with solid forms and arrangements.

For example, opener The Valley Of Ten Thousand Smokes has the initial signs of a techno track, but its programmed beat is a framework for a series of sinister/melancholy Bearpark phrases, sweeping in at different registers. As much rock action as ambience.

If the first thing that surprised me was how composed the music is on this album, the second was what Os did with the drums. I thought he wanted material for looping. In other words, during the session, I was trying to play reasonably well, but wasn't bothering about getting a good take. I'd never heard the material, and assumed Os would just chop and loop the good bits of what was usually a single take. I didn't realise he was going to use large sections of unedited playing. Perhaps neither did he. Mercury Shuffle, the most straight-ahead track on the album, is a case in point. The feel is late summer evening looking west over a Dagenham factory as the sun sets. By the sound of it, Os used the drums pretty much as I played them. Towards the end I start messing up, and take the entire track down with me.

My Sunsets Are All One-Sided begins with a 50s electronica Raymond Scott feel with something that sounds like a steel drum in reverse. Then some rolling taps echo in the background, and it takes on an new shape and the excitement mounts, pauses a couple of times, then swoops back in with pounding piano, offbeat post-rock distorted drums and looped guitar swells. It's pretty thrilling.

More futuristic electronica arrives in the form of No Candy No Can Do, a piece full of character and one of my favourites, with a sublime jazzy lilt and lounge guitar sounding like it was played in an enormous 23nd century shopping mall. Terrific, and contrasted nicely by the next piece, Two Is Ambient. This one has a thrillingly sinister and menacing downbeat groove, acoustic guitar adding to the tension and unease. Dirty drums drag in and out, it goes gently mad towards the end, slowly taking itself to pieces around the meandering beat.

In the brilliantly titled Chalk Is Organised Dust, sci-fi sweeps and burbles give way to a wiry string section and a slightly wonky assembly-line shuffling drum loop. Like watching an amateur production of Fritz Lang's Metropolis played out in telephone exchange in the 1940s, from your vantage point on a grassy knoll. Following the bitter-sweet pastorale of Insecure Digital which finishes all too soon, the album closes with an acoustic flourish introducing Turtles All The Way Down, which quickly descends into some demonic Bearpark distortion. By the time the drums kick in, it's gripping, the tense pulsing and chugging guitar constantly suggesting it's going to break into something else. It doesn't. In the end, again the drums fall apart and take the rest of the track with them.

Overall, the album is a great showcase for the dual Darkroom strengths. Mike's endless imagination and sound palette with Os's arrangement and production skills combine to a fine mix of beauty and tension. While albums of this genre, constructed from samples recycled from other music, can sound awkward and disjointed, this one is no Frankenstein's Monster. All the source material is organically home-grown, and the result is coherent and human.

While they were chosing the album cover, Mike showed me the candidates. His favourite was the dated concord photo, in its a day an image of the future, now a dated relic. I particularly like this, Mike said, pointing to the flowery-patterned fold-up chair in the bottom left corner. Improvizone regular Nick Cottam and I were in a cheesy band several years ago, for which, as a symbol of my appreciation of this, I am happy to tell you I wore a thin nylon shirt with a strikingly similar design.

Improvizone are taking part by playing an evening of chillout electronic grooves and soundscapes in a bar near South Woodford tube station called Switch. The lineup for this one will be the regular Improvizone London bar band of

• Andrew Booker (electronic drums)
• Michael Bearpark (guitar)
• Os (laptop)
• Simon Laffy (bass)

We're going to be packing ourselves into a floor space the size of a couple of doormats, like all improvising bar bands should be able to, and one of us is even going to be sitting on a riser thing they have especially for DJs. It would typically be the seated drummer that goes there, but we all sit down in this outfit, and I'm not sure I'll fit, and Mike's just as interesting to watch as me, so he might be the better podium exhibit on this one.

Besides thinking about where we're going to sit, and making a poster, I've yet to prepare for this gig at all. While I'm slightly uneasy about this, it is what these gigs were supposed to be about when I first had the idea. I wanted a regular gig that I didn't have to go to much trouble organising or preparing for. Cue many busy months of organising gigs and preparing stuff, this website and all its contents, tracking down players, finding venues... to honest this has worn me down a bit, one reason why there isn't a lot in the diary right now.

Anyway I fully expect a couple of hours of watching Mike, grooving with the Laffsta and listening to Os fill the spaces with textural layers processed in Ableton Live through his own plug-ins will be the medicine that revives my enthusiasm, and you may be able to see us again for one or two more Improvizone gigs towards the end of the year. Dunno yet.

I will probably not bother with the projections for this gig, as the Switch Bar don't have a big screen. They do have TVs and a DVD player, but last time I tried to burn a DVD of my visuals, it took several years off my life expectancy and I developed a nervous twitch. Probably from watching the material.