SEVER

Before the session, Thomas photographed details in nature that captured the kind of horror we wanted SEVER to explore. We separated the images into lower- and higher-intensity mood boards, which stayed visible throughout the session as visual prompts for each improvisation.

Kirsten would describe a mood and sound quality, James would suggest and demonstrate techniques that could produce it, and together we chose what to explore. Each brief then became more specific, for example: five minutes of improvisation with high density and gesture, low volume, and two selected techniques.

This gave James time to stay with one idea, letting techniques change, collide and develop as part of one continuous musical thought. Those combinations and progressions gave SEVER its horror character, and became what we worked hardest to preserve.

We then cut and recombined sections from within each improvisation to build SEVER’s playable notes and round robins. Keeping every edit within its original performance turned that stream of consciousness into something playable without reducing it to fixed one-shots. The character of James’s performances stays intact, without narrowing your choices to a handful of fixed gestures that decide too much for you.