Racer Session #443 | Erin Birgy | October 7, 2018

Greetings, Racers!

This weekend we have a very special session. Erin Birgy, a dear friend of ours, will present her first Racer Session.

Erin Birgy is a song-dribbler, a Pacific Northwest, desert-dwelling rodeo child with an unmistakable laugh who was allegedly cursed upon conception. She is most well-known for her work as Mega Bog, which has seen great and deserved success these last few years, simultaneously stretching and wandering in a crescendo towards musical freedom. Her work is melodies always lush, erotic, and free; chords always dissonant, abstract and evolutionary.

Erin will be guiding session participants through a guided improvisational practice rooted in emotional awareness. She describes the structure as follows:

“An image trigger therapy jam - a more transparent and empathetic version of what the session is already about, but acknowledging, accepting and incorporating the necessity of the other senses in a musical meditative experience with each other. Each group will try to see who is feeling what and associate personal projections to the images and decide if the group can either work through or re-route the emotional response with the listening and playing tools they already have.

1) Project images onto the stage,

2) give the improvisers some time to process musically.

It’s a practice of empathy, which is pretty much what RS already is, but a little more deliberate, transparent and incorporating voice piety and images to accompany music. If an image triggers joy for one and pain for another, for example, the group needs to decide which direction to take it. Work through or re-route, and since there’s a finite time for every image, people have room to dig in the ruff and not worry about the entire jam.”

Erin will present an opening set with the same structure to ease us into the evening, before breaking off and opening things up. We’ll start at 8pm, so please find yourself at Cafe Racer in time to hear it all.