Fire Tower Four 'Day One'

Abstract

The Fire Tower Four album Day One (2020) represents an example of non-hierarchical, pan-ideomatic and structurally indeterminate music improvisation of a kind identified by Gillon (2018) as ‘Post-modernist Improvisation’. It relates to the practice-based research of Partridge (2016) on the ‘decentring of the traditional concerns of music theory, technique and genre convention in favour of enquiries into the functionality of the ensemble’s shared creativity’.

Fire Tower 4 is a collective of improvising musicians from a variety of musical backgrounds, who work without preset material or structure producing music created in the moment and never to be repeated. Unlike Partridge’s work with the Cold Bath Street project, Fire Tower Four is an emsemble that is not led by a director and does make use of any pre-prepared musical ideas in its improvisational practice. The album was recorded live in the studio over a single day and without overdubs .