ELFM Chapel residency: Closing thoughts
I didn't get a chance to blog over the last week as I missed the last day of the residency at ELFM due to coming down with the worst man-flu ever and then being straight into other projects. However, here I am closing off my documenting of the making part of the project with some thoughts on how the week went.
With the intention of trying to write and record a site specific concept album in a week, we didn't do too badly. By the end of the week we'd almost finished seven new songs, looking at subjects from the building of the Chapel to the allotment outside and the pub down the road, songs from the viewpoints of users of the building in all it's incarnations, and songs that celebrate the future life of the community within and around the building. We'd managed to involve around 50 people in recording vocals for three of the songs, including other local artists (thanks to Hope and Social and Fuzzy Jones particularly), staff and regular contributors to the ELFM output, and members of the local community.
We spent a lot of time after the week discussing the process we'd followed as the experience itself was so intensive that it seemed impossible to stop and reflect at the time. In no particular order are some of the things that came up in discussions.
Apart from this blog and a few tweeted photographs we found it hard to document the week as much as we'd have liked. We were really too heavily in the work to be able to pull away and just record the process. One of the ways we could have resolved this was to get a third party in with the goal of just recording and documenting the process free from any other concerns. My hope before the residency was that, free from other distractions and time pressures, we'd have a few days to investigate process - both the process of making and also of playing live, so the two become more integrated and intuitive. We didn't really get the chance to do this, in part because we'd perhaps foolishly set ourselves the task of making an album in a week. From the outset we'd created a pressure to deliver a tangible thing within a timescale that didn't leave much time for exploratory work. From the point of view of funding it's clearly crucial to see what the benefit is going to be and in the case of a radio station, content is important, but I wonder whether we should have looked at generating more content relating to process rather than product, which would have solved many problems. Firstly, addressing the issue above of not having enough focus on development of our process. Secondly, we could have involved many others in the documentation of what we were doing and thereby had a closer level of engagement with the project. Thirdly, we could have generated much more actual content than just the finished audio, which could have fed into a range of additional programming for the station. Hindsight is a wondrous thing and I think we'd look at being more creative with outcomes next time around. Another structural issue we'd talked about was whether the time should be split into an exploratory/R&D phase, and a separate core making phase. This seemed a bit more sensible a suggestion at the time but I wonder whether it was just reactive to having too little time to play rather than make during the week. it now seems like it's probably a simplistic way of ringfencing exploratory time and I think perhaps if we had renegotiated what the project outcomes would have been this might not have been much of an issue.
I believe though that it's been hugely beneficial to have had a week of site specific working at this point. Sensibly, we might not have chosen to work on another album one month after the joint release of the previous two, but working with ELFM so closely this month was a truly wonderful opportunity and experience.
More info on the album release in due course.
