Cadavre exquis is a game where you draw (or write) something on a sheet of paper, fold the sheet over the drawing, letting only a little bit of it show, and somebody else then continues the drawing (or sentence), and so on (it’s a game that was invented by the Surrealists, appropriately enough).
I’ve been playing the musical equivalent of « cadavre exquis » for a while with Matt Love (and Sons of Sarookh).
Matt usually gets the ball rolling by sending me some backing tracks, sometimes generated algorithmically, or sometimes built out of found material. I’ll usually add a melody and or some extra rhythm tracks, etc. Matt might then write words and sing them.
I relish the fact that these projects take me where I wouldn’t have gone on my own and I enjoy « checking my ego at the door » and seeing where the process takes the resulting song. It’s in no way a guarantee that the result will be palatable, but hopefully, it ends up being more than the sum of its collaborators’ inspirations.
It’s also very liberating not to be responsible for the whole piece, and to riff off of somebody else’s creativity. Especially since I seem stuck on writing music to words these days, and I’m not a prolific lyricist. So I really appreciate the opportunity to play and compose more experimental, instrumental pieces.
The reason it works so well with Matt is because he’s one of those incredibly rare musicians/artists who puts the music and the process first, and who worries about the stain on his reputation later. (Needless to say, if you’ve listened to any of my songs, you know that I know no shame). I used to naively believe that all artists/musicians were like that. Boy was I wrong, but that is worth an entire separate post.
Anyway, at some point in the future, I hope to be able to link to final versions of three recent collaborative pieces:
- « Underwater Groove » (which might end up being a Waiters song),
- « Shevilla Lobolle » which is close in spirit to Ummm in that my tracks and Matt’s shouldn’t work together but somehow do (although this time, it seems I was possessed by the ghost of Abba instead of the ghost of Elvis), and
- « Mystery Snack » where I unfortunately had to distract attention from Matt’s delightful guitar arpeggios with my kitchy, syrupy, overbearing saxophone melody.