From the Archive: Seattle Guitar Circulation (6.4M mp3).
This piece from Knotwork features the 2002 line-up of the Seattle Guitar Circle. The circulation was improvised by players: Curt Golden, Dean Jensen, Bob Williams, Jaxie Binder, Chris Gibson, Derek DiFilippo, SB.
Notes: this song tile is derived from the image (based upon an Ingrid Pape-Sheldon photo shot at Microsoft Studios!) used on the first Seattle Guitar Circle CD cover, “Twilight” and the stunning 4+ minute circulation was improvised one evening in Bob and Jaxie’s living room for the SB Box Set recording project. I’ve always loved this photo as it captures a loving interaction between Bob and Jax while Bill Rieflin is giving me a look of disbelief from across the room, obviously responding to something ludicrous that I’ve said, while Curt smirks knowingly and Dean remains content and focused on the photographer. This image, and this improvised Circulation capture the second generation SGC in its essence.
It may also be useful to note that very few people in the world actually know what a 'Circulation' is. It's perhaps harder to describe (as hard perhaps as it is to participate in a musical Circulation) than it is to experience. A Circulation is best experienced when you, the audient, are sitting directly in the center of a circle of guitarists, each playing one note of a melody that literally 'circulates' around you as it unfolds.
More specifically, each note in a Circulation melody is played, one at a time, by one guitarist at time in sequence in a guitar circle.
Circulation melodies are literally born out of a group collaboration as they flow around the room between each guitarist. Musical Circulations are, by definition, the product of a sort of 'group intelligence.' Unmusical circulations sound like a series of unintentional, disconnected random notes. Musical Circulations sound as if a master composer were playing a beautiful melody on one instrument (that just happen to be distributed across the hands of six to twenty guitarists, each playing one note at at time.
There is currently only one place in Seattle to experience Circulations played live each week: Tuning the Air, which is the group that the Seattle Guitar Circle has evolved into since I've been taking a break over this past year.
Listen again to this free mp3 download of the Seattle Guitar Circulation and visualize the fact that each note of this melody is actually being played by a different person, in real time.
None of us knew where it would go from the the first note to the last.
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Why mine the archive? Mostly because in the foreground, I'm working on so many top secret things that I can't yet speak about: quiet excitements with longer term ROI. Not unrelated, today I received a copy of Nascent in the mail today from old friend and bandmate Bert Lams. Great stuff!
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Also, nice to speak with old BTV partner David Singleton this morning about other related excitements, and he told me about the official launch of http://www.dgmlive.com. Nice to see the ideas behind BootlegTV hitting the light of day! Inspiring work. I only wish I had time to be a fan again and listen to the hours of content on the site!
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