ea balancing act with controled dynamics

got quite a few releases on the winds measure recordings label...this is a very inspiring one from the ea collective. i think i may have heard them before and seemed to sense they are from Poland, but the lineup of six players here includes a few non Polish names. as a collective Andre Goncalves, Andy Graydon, Ben Owen, Gill Arno, Richard Garet, and Gil Sanson seem to have a mystical power which derives from true cooperativeness, imagination, and shared visions, and have formed a strong bond which i can respect... one of the things they determined they would experiment with is scored compositions for guided improvisations, of which Balancing Act is the 28 minute result of one such foray. Gil Sanson brought the score for the piece to the table. Said score could simply be a written instruction; one sheet of paper, reproduced on the card insert here, states that 'players can switch dynamic ranges or stick to one as they please, as long as they follow the sound/no sound ratios'. A simple discipline, if you understand what it means. And while that talk of ranges and ratios may appear forbiddingly conceptual, the results (while opaque) on Balancing Act are clearly tempered with a great deal of intuition and feeling.

I have no idea what instruments (if any) are being played on this inscrutable recording, and i don't think that even matters. ea wanted to get away from what they saw as a 'controlled outcome' and instead follow a sort of 'map' that would help them to direct and channel their activity. Not the sort of map that gets you from one place to another, but one that describes a piece of unknown territory sufficiently to allow each traveller to view it, and explore it in ways that they see fit. Andy Graydon's notes here describe a rare confluence of mutual respect between the players, great intelligence, restraint,and a genuine desire to steer themselves somewhere new where they had never been before.

I'm reminded of the early experiments of MEV (no less), who ended up with totally different results, but found themselves similarly frustrated by the confines of experimental music; improvisation, which appeared as first to offer total freedom, instead turned out to be just as much of a trap as anything else. The Spacecraft recording, made in cologne in 1967, documents their attempts to escape that trap, through a sort of vertical thinking that gave them lift-off from Planet Earth. In like manner, Graydon speaks of 'the immediate sense that all boundaries would be permeable... we were all here to pass through surfaces once considered solid'. He is speaking of the first group meetings he had with ea, where the potential for freedom seemed to be made manifest by the sight of the glass coffee tables and slide transparencies; each felt they could see through layers, into new possibilities. Listen for yourself to this very intriguing and mysterious construct, and discover where your ears may take you. It may appear at first grey, inhuman, desolate, abstracted and totally lacking in any humanity. But get past this barrier, and you will be amazed at what you find.

Ed Pinset 28/07/2008
the sound projector 16th issue 2008