There´s a lot of it now, so I decided to make a dedicated topic for it. Ever since my old band Elma broke up I´ve been mostly doing various forms of improv, and it really ramped up in the last two years, in 2023 alone I´ll probably have done around sixty live sets of improv with a large variety of people, still got three dates ahead of me before the year ends. Latest thing to show for is a series of videos this youtube channel run by a friend is doing with me, a small series, we´re halfway through it. First one was planned to be a trio, life got in the way:



For the second one I tried processing the sound of the street in front of this small venue that opened recently in my neighbourhood to find out what came of it:



I was not in love with the results of the session as a whole (the episode is not the uncut set), but thought it might be interesting enough to some people so we put up the uncut thing as a bonus:



Next one comes out in january, it´s a guitar and dance duo I do regularly with a friend. I´m really happy with it.

I really stopped focusing on recording my stuff and have been mostly playing out as much as I can (I only really count the sets that happen in front of an audience, even if like one person shows up, as I think of it as doing it for keeps). Some sets get registered by other folk every now and then. This was a recent one that I liked, though it was on the long side (I usually try to keep it up to thirty minutes). I´ve been playing the guitar sometimes, the bass a little less often, and doing a lot of what I call plainly "sound processing", which is basically working from whatever who´s playing with me generates to create new layers of sound, and we pick it up from there, back and forth. For this one I did that and played a bit of bass:



The drummer is the same who´s in the first video above. Sound is a bit rough, but I enjoyed the results, I thought we kept it dynamic.

This one happened in the same place as the one right above, and this quartet will be in the fourth episode in the video series, we shot a different set than this show earlier that afternoon. I only met the violin player that very day:



As for non-improv stuff, I´ve been playing the bass in different expanded formations of the duo Test. The largest one recently was the Test Big Band, with 12 or 13 people (we count the lighting person as a member this time, I think reasons will be obvious). This set starts out as a duo, the whole band joins in as the last duo song dies down around 25m20s



I start by processing the drums (that´s the glitchy stuff that comes in as the drummer plays less and less), then switch to bass for the actual song that follows. A lot happens afterwards.

There are a lot of bits and pieces that I liked from past sets in my instagram, I´m @berradoandrea there, if anyone finds any of this interesting:



This was a quartet of a dancer (same one who does the duo with me), a laser person, a ten string viola player and me processing sound and playing a bit of guitar and noise. Same venue where we shot the video in which I process the sounds from the street.

This is from the same set as the last one above, but shot in a way that tells a story, really liked it.

Bernardo wrote: This is from the same set as the last one above, but shot in a way that tells a story, really liked it.

Good stuff overall but I particularly liked this one. Cool!

Thanks! Yeah, that session was one of this year's best, I really enjoyed it.

My last release is still this guitar and drum duo EP from right before the pandemic:



I really like the format, next one is probably also a guitar and drum duo (different drummer), and even shorter.

My favorite track from this EP is the last one, needs decent low end to work. I think the whole EP holds up well, though.

penningtron wrote: Wed Dec 27, 2023 8:32 am

Bernardo wrote: This is from the same set as the last one above, but shot in a way that tells a story, really liked it.

Good stuff overall but I particularly liked this one. Cool!

Whoa! This one really resonated with me as well! Great stuff, Bernardo!

Thanks! Another bit from that one got posted:

I need to catch up on your stuff here Bernardo!!!

There's more now:



This is the dance and guitar duo we do regularly.

Lots of low end information on this one.

The day we shot the episode above we did three short pieces of improv. One of them we used uncut in the actual episode (plus fragments of the others), and we're releasing the other two as standalone vids, as we really enjoyed them, and they turned out really different from each other. One of them just came out:



The other one comes next week.