Cold Bath Street - Return to the Atomic Age

Abstract

Improvised Music CD in Collaboration with Poet Winston Plowes
Directed by Simon Partridge
UCLan Recordings 2017

The Cold Bath Street group engages improvisation within small ensembles of popular musicians. The band utilise pan-idiomatic and non-idiomatic approaches.

The group improvised the fifty minute piece presented here in a single take from a short list of basic cues which were either stylistic or dictated musical parameters e.g. a chord to work around. Playing with most musical parameters left open is intended to encourage organic interactions and spontaneity.

This work showcases a collaboration that continued over eighteen months with poet Winston Plowes. The poet and musicians tested different ways to interact both explicit and covert. Demonstrated here are the poetry existing in its own sonic islands amongst periods of music and having the poetry and music woven together, with all participants improvising and abandoning the linear progression through the spoken text. Pre-existing Plowes poetry was chosen specifically to suite the interactions with music. Encouraged by the musicians, the poet also used microphones and radio static in order to blend with the music and blur the boundaries of discipline.