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From The Desk Of Camper Van Beethoven’s Jonathan Segel: Improvised Music

CamperVanBeethovenLogoLa Costa Perdida (429) kicks off Camper Van Beethoven’s 30th-anniversary year amidst an orchestrated (if deserving) surge in recognition for the group—everything from Paul Rudd donning a vintage Camper concert tee in the film This Is 40 to glowing quotes from members of R.E.M. and the Meat Puppets. The LP is CVB’s first album since 2004’s New Roman Times and was mostly recorded at multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Segel’s Oakland home studio a year prior to his move to Sweden. “The process was similar, perhaps, to the recording of Camper’s third album, in that we could experiment and had time to work on things,” says Segel. “The first two CVB albums were recorded in a weekend.” Segel will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on the band.

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Segel: I like improvised music. It’s interesting to me, in most of its forms, idiomatic or non-idiomatic. I find it incredible when competent musicians can make compositions in real time.

Camper began a relationship with Eugene Chadbourne back in the mid-’80s, and we made several albums together and some tours. Even after the breakup of CVB (that first time), Victor and I continued to play with Eugene for another 10 years or so. Now, we’d had some improv experience in college playing weird art music (I played David Lowery’s fretless bass in one ensemble called EPI, for example), but when we played with Eugene, there was a new sense of limitlessness, and furthermore it could happen within any style of music! Where, for example, Derek Bailey had written about improvisation in terms of playing within the idiom of the music or (the attempt) to play music that was not in an idiom, Eugene starts with a firm basis of all styles of music and takes them elsewhere. We did a tour of Europe in February of 1991, right when the (first) Gulf War started and no other American bands wanted to fly. We played American music, and mostly protest music: country, rock, jazz, folk, etc. But regardless of the stylistic idiom, we took it outside. It was extreme.

Even when we played only acoustically later, the improv could become sound-based. We played a section of Cardew’s Treatise on acoustic guitar, violin and bass. When I went back to Graduate school at Mills College, my professors were Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, Fred Frith and, later, Joelle Léandre. I was Fred’s assistant for the contemporary performance ensemble. Needless to say, we were inundated with improvisation of all types, and graphic-based composition, and all points in between. The San Francisco Bay Area has an amazing scene of contemporary musicians, and a great deal of them are amazing improvisers, whether they come from a classical or jazz or rock background, or noise and art. Many shows have people of all backgrounds playing together. Check it out.

Many people dislike improvised music, especially when it is sound based or “non-idiomatic.” (In fact, the idea of non-idiomatic improv that started with the folks in the ’60s rebelling against rigid rules in the classical and jazz worlds has almost become an idiom unto itself. Check out early AMM or Derek Bailey/Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and compare to things people are doing today.) I think it’s just a matter of how to listen, whether the listener can enjoy each sound in and of itself as much as they can enjoy music that leads you by the nose (ear) to a foregone conclusion. It’s a very “in the moment” type of listening, perhaps, and definitely trying to free yourself from the passage of time and enjoying sound as it happens is not easy. And beyond that, when the players create a composition within this type of sound field, the listener must be in two time frames at once.

Similarly, of course, not many people like the classical avant-garde of the 20th century. I totally love it. Maybe this is also a form of listening. I read a column recently by another composer who wrote that atonal music sounded tonal; even the subway sounds sounded tonal to him. I understand. It’s all music.

I like sound-art, but I also like improvisation in rock music. I missed it greatly in the ’80s, when people thought guitar solos weren’t cool because they represented the big rock scene that happened in the ’70s, and the only bands doing guitar solos were metal bands who composed them very carefully. I mean Led Zeppelin was something special, if only for the fact that they improvised live and lengthily. Camper usually has some framework to improvise in, if we have enough time in concert, and we have taken to using Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive as the head.

When I was recording the last couple of tracks for All Attractions, we had an afternoon left in the studio, so we improvised. It became the bonus disc, Apricot Jam, where I took the improvised rock band recording and added a few overdubs and such. The last few shows I’ve done on my own have just been improvised. And people seemed to like it.

There’s a band I like from Copenhagen called Øresund Space Collective, whom I just found out improvise their stuff entirely. It’s spacey rock music. Really nice. I don’t know of many more rock bands that are all improv; I think I might like ones that aren’t doctrinal about it, but improvise within their own songs like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix did. Jazz players have been doing this the whole time! And I mean guys who can actually play, not like so many of those neo-psychedelic bands that just drip reverb on the mix to sound ’60s when there’s no substance to the music to begin with. (I’m talking to you, San Francisco.)

Video after the jump.

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