Racer Session #154 | King Tears Bat Trip | January 20, 2013
King Tears Bat Trip is happy to be collectively curating Racer Sessions for the Cry & Roar Festival! The evening will be divided into three parts:
1. We will perform a new piece that was collaboratively composed as a group. Its purpose is to expand the palette that the group has been developing since our first appearance at Racer Sessions in February of 2010. Like previous pieces, the music attempts to erase the listener’s expectations of form and blur the sense and elapsing time by constructing repeating rhythms which are developed over a long time at an exaggeratedly slow pace. The repeating rhythms are elated by extensive improvisations based on simple melodic structures.
The drums in this piece experiment with layering conflicting rhythms to create a controlled dissonance. There is also more exploration of orchestrating components of the group’s sounds to create more extreme shifts in texture throughout the piece. Several new elements will be added to the mix as well such as a newly modified Chango, created by Brandon Lucia, which was programmed to provide harmonic richness to the low register. The Chango will be controlled by a strobe light and a flashlight. There will also be pedal steel guitar added to the piece to provide more rhythmic and melodic depth.
2. There will be a second improvised piece where we will open the stage to any and all Racer participants who would like to join. The King Tears Bat Trip drum section will play continuously as ensembles of non-Bat Trip participants will cycle on and off stage as dictated by the drum section. This piece is to last approximately 20-30 minutes.
3. The remainder of the evening will be open to free-form group improvisation. However, there will be one strict parameter in place: No Fade-Out Endings. This type of ending has become a stylistic characteristic of Racer Sessions improvisations. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but in the spirit of deviating from the norm the purpose of this parameter is to encourage groups to seek out all the many other possibilities of concluding a piece. We think it will be interesting to see how more focus on avoiding a decay to silence at the end will change the character of the rest of the piece.
King Tears Bat Trip is:
Neil Welch - Tenor Saxophone and Effects
Luke Bergman - Guitar and Pedal Steel Guitar
Brandon Lucia - Chango and Effects
Evan Woodle - Drums
Kristian Garrard - Drums
Chris Icasiano - Drums
See you on Sunday!