#tedbyrnes

It’s hard for improvised music to speed without blurring, to maintain pace or even accelerate without getting crowded and volume-heavy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing - lots of great improv motors itself into exciting enlargement - but it’s tougher to keep moving while maintaining space and precision, and making each individual sound legible and important as the emerging whole. Ted Byrnes and William Hutson have achieved this rarity on 01, a work that never slows down or pauses yet always holds firm to a kind of extended pointillism.

At first I wanted to credit that effect to Byrnes, whose drumming is so relentless yet so exact that it feels like a high-wire act. I keep marveling at how he can run so fast without ever tripping himself up. But on further listens Hutson’s contributions prove to be just as impressive. His tape manipulations have a clear presence yet never obscure anything that Byrnes is doing. The way he finds nano-spaces between Byrnes’ sounds in which to insert his own reminds me of that trick where someone quickly stabs a knife into the gaps between their spread-out fingers. The result is fascinating, seat-edge music that hopefully has many numbers in its future.

– Marc Masters

<a href="http://tedbyrneswilliamhutson.bandcamp.com/album/01">01 by Ted Byrnes & William Hutson</a>

TED BYRNES & WILLIAM HUTSON on 01

Ted:

My practice has really developed into becoming about density, anxiety and communication. Whether it's communication between me and a duo partner (or larger group setting), or the communication that my drums and objects have - that sort of responsive action is very important to me. In terms of density, what that means for me is small and individual sounds working together to become a larger 'mass' of sound (kind of like how I hear The Rita, or something like Pateras Baxter Brown). Ideally, those sounds create a kind of 'anxiety' - or maybe more an uncertainty. It's amazing to work with William, whose real-time tape loop and mic'd devices setup is direct and provides a similar kind of physical and aural feedback that my instrument does - it provokes a similar action / reaction. The duo, to me, feels (both when playing in it and listening to it) that the two instruments could both be coming from the same place - that it’s a bit like one machine reacting to itself.

William:

I developed this instrument in order to play with Ted, and also for my upcoming duo with Jonathan Borges of Pedestrian Deposit. The goal was to build a system that has the speed and immediacy of an acoustic instrument, but is electronic. I wanted my physical gestures to create the sounds, and for me to be able to change those instantaneously, or stop them altogether. Too often, I feel disconnected from sound when my only interface to an electronic instrument are its knobs. With Ted, I think we play a kind of improvisation that approximates the density of noise music, but incorporating the style of, say, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, where the language is created out of tiny, interlocking sonic events. In noise music a very complex-piece of audio can run indefinitely without any human input, but in our duo, every sound is the sonification of one of our limbs. If we stop moving, so does the music.