Racer Session #151 | Ronan Delisle | December 30, 2012
Three duets for Guitar and Drumset
Presented by Ronan Delisle (Composer, Guitar) and Evan Woodle (Drumset)
The Racer Sessions have been a source of inspiration to me since the first session I attended in Winter of 2010. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the refreshing sounds I heard and welcoming attitudes I experienced made it clear to me right away that Café Racer was a special place and that I was surrounded by very unique musicians. I’m very thankful to be able to share some music I’ve been working on with this wonderful community of people I hold in very high esteem.
At this session, I’ll be presenting three songs that I wrote specifically for guitar and drumset throughout the last few months. Although these songs will sound very different from one another, they all came to be through the process of recording myself improvising for long amounts of time and reviewing the recordings to find little ideas worth exploring. I really enjoy this middle area (Middle Earth?) between improvisation and composition, where I can create music that is spontaneously conceived but critically shaped after the fact.
I wanted to throw myself a curveball, so to speak, by eliminating the lower melodic register. I found that not having a bass player steered me into a more rhythmic territory with the drums, discovering the percussive nature of the guitar as opposed to performing its more common melodic/harmonic role.
These pieces are all very guitar-istic, which is very different from music I’ve written in the past. The guitar styles of David Longstreth, Bill Frisell, Ry Cooder and Leo Brouwer were all in my head while composing this music. For a long time, mostly due to the mindset I was inhabiting, I was not accepting of ideas that just looked like “guitar” ideas: moving shapes around, open voicings, etc. This attitude is partially due to my inexperience, but also because of the heavy emphasis on functionality and order that theory courses and composition classes impose on writing music. Simplicity, chaos and non-codifiable sounds are beautiful on guitar and with this in mind, I hope to open myself up through these new ideas and not just what I know to work through musical rules.
Thanks to Evan Woodle for his creativity and willingness to be involved in this session. See you all soon!
Ronan Delisle
ps. You can hear one of the pieces, “Someone in the Summer” on my soundcloud.