Erica Bramham
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Erica Bramham
Musician. Composer. Music teacher.

SCP #123: Rings Around Rings

In my attempt to catch up I allowed myself to just play around with the previous day's video for this one.

Song-Chain Project, Abstractions & Experiment, Free Improvisations, Wordless SongsErica Bramham13 May 2017voice, improvisation, video art
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SCP #124: Drawer Diving

Song-Chain Project, Both Sides Of Love, The Other Side Of Love, Domestic SongsErica Bramham13 May 2017voice, bass, surrealist, imagination
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SCP #122: Rings

Song-Chain Project, Free Improvisations, Wordless Songs, Abstractions & ExperimentErica Bramham13 May 2017voice, improvisation, free improvisation
melbourne,
australia

lungmoss records

Here we go again... 1/#100daysofpractice and the beginning of #thedryadproject. For the year I've been learning bass I have neglected pizzicato practice and it shows when I try and play jazz. I'm working at the moment on getting both fingers moving freely and in coordination with my right hand at faster tempos. The first clip is a Rabbath exercise, intended for arco practice but modified for alternating pizzicato. The second clip is a simple melodic idea I "wrote" via serial composition using the word chestnut, which is the tree that features in Hans Christensen Andersen's story The Dryad. I kept the open string drone idea from the Rabbath exercise and put it into 3/4 for variation. Both my fingers are developing blisters now, so I guess I'll be going back to the bow tomorrow.
In 2016 I undertook #thesongchainproject, a foolhardy attempt to write, record and share a song a day for a year.  I made it through 180 songs before it got the better of me, and I haven't written anything since.  I honestly think it's taken me this long to recover from the stress of the undertaking, but I've really started to miss the challenge of composition.  I've devised a much more relaxed project, which I will begin tomorrow along with a new #100daysofpractice challenge. I'm calling it The Dryad Project, and you can read a shortened artistic statement below (more on my website). At the moment I'm planning on simply posting a snippet of my work toward the project each day as part of a new 100 day challenge, but I might also put some longer excerpts onto IGTV and live-stream some improvisation sessions.  I don't want to drive myself crazy, so I'm not making any big plans until I get back into the swing of writing.  I hope you will enjoy following me as I attempt to write music for an instrument I can barely play! . . . THE DRYAD PROJECT In Greek mythology A Dryad is a tree nymph or spirit whose life is tied to the tree she is born with. If the tree flourishes, so does she, and if the tree dies she dies with it.  A year ago I took up learning the double bass, and as my attachment to the instrument has deepened I have started to connect with the life inside it, which could perhaps be romantically viewed as the Dryad that was once a part of the tree my bass was carved from. There are many beautiful stories, myths and beliefs about the life and memory attached to musical instruments, and the longer I spend with my bass the more it comes to life, responding to the weather, to my moods, to the music it has played, and the music it wants to play. The Dryad Project is both a personal composition and practice project, with the composition directed by my challenges and interests on the instrument.  It is about bringing creativity and improvisation into my practice routine and letting the instrument direct my creative process, all while using composition to help solve technical challenges.
Every Autumn I buy chestnuts hoping they are the easy to peel variety, but they so rarely are, and I spend an hour cursing, burning my fingers, trying to extract them from their skins. I hit the jackpot today, I've never ended up with so many whole nuts. Even still, peeling the good ones doesn't play so well with bass fingers. Tonight's Mont Blanc might be the last, unless I can track down some frozen ones.
I've just posted on my blog for the first time in quite a while (too busy practicing you know...). Some reflections on my first year learning bass, link in bio. I've also decided, perhaps foolishly, to embark on a new creative project I'm calling The Dryad Project, although I might wait until tomorrow to officially start working on that. Apparently I'm recovered enough from the trauma of #thesongchainproject...
 

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