Blunderbuss

Blunderbuss is a collaborative work with artist and musician Sybren Renema. It's an improvised piece of music of variable duration for saxophone (Sybren) and custom software (myself).

The software patch I developed for the performance has had several incarnations, but usually consists of a system for triggering, looping and granulating individual percussion samples, mostly sourced from recordings of gamelan, gagaku and hsaing waing music.

Blunderbuss was intended in the spirit of the jazz tradition of musicians teaming up to form ad-hoc improvisational duos – the name (a type of gun, and a word of mixed Dutch-English origin) is an homage to Peter Brötzmann's seminal work Machine Gun.

We performed Blunderbuss at Inspace at Edinburgh University (with the support of New Media Scotland and Embassy Annuale) and at the CCA in Glasgow (as part of "The Pitch: Apocalypse").

Performance photographs by Luke Cooke-Yarborough.

A still from the visuals accompanying the Inspace performance of Blunderbuss.