Wednesday, November 4, 2009

"Ugh. Are they honestly Jamming?"

When Battlehooch was first getting started (back in UCSC when we were called The New Rectangle and/or The Sex) we would jam.

ALOT.

There are many shows we played (with upwards of 10+ people in the band at some points, mind you) where no more than 2 people at any given time "knew" what was going on. someone would just yell "we're in the key of G" and then we'd blatch for a a while.

bless our patient and supportive college friends and their "approval" of such musical expeditions.

yet despite the near critical role that improvisation has played in our foundation as a band, once we moved to San Francisco and started calling ourselves Battlehooch, the improvisation dried up. Sure we'd twist things around every show, and sure we'd noodle around in practice, but things became very calculated and exact (trust us, it was all for the better). we never would reach points in the set where we'd all be jamming super hard, driving ahead full bore towards a cliff, not having any idea if our parachutes would work once we flew off the edge.

...slowly it's starting to make it's way back into the fore.

here's a recording of an improvisation that we did to start off our suprise show in our buddy joe's basement.

it's based on a groovy interlocking rhythm that we've been messing around with since the new rectangle days. (BRINGING IT ALL FULL CIRCLE)

Joe's Basement (A Battlehooch Improvisation 10 24 09) by AJ McKinley