A case of music-making catching up with the way we live day to day in an electronic age perhaps New Voices composer Shaun Blezard who has performed with Matthew Bourne, Ryoko Akama, Anton Hunter, and Mick Beck among other collaborators over the years has just released what he terms “an experiment in communal music” using new tablet and touch screen technology as a kind of tabula rasa for others in his freshly sourced community of collaborators to add their own music to.

Morphing with a flourish to incorporate their input the remarkably titled social media-inspired Some Some Unicorn and The Golden Periphery (Clutter Music) his album involves 30 musicians and artists including Aardvark, Martin Archer, Jamie Barnes, Steve Wharton, Hannah White and the Unicornian SSU Choir of Hope. Blezard comments on his website: “I wanted to marry my solo electronic work as Clutter with the improv world in a way that doesn’t dilute either but makes something that builds on the other.”

His method initially was to record four hours of solo improvisations using an iPad, whittling these down to tracks and uploading these to Dropbox and Google Drive putting the call out for people to play along. The Cumbria-based composer says: “Some remixed the work, others processed it, others had long email conversations about what to do. Others just played.” More details about the project here 

Shaun Blezard, above.

Photo: Steve Phelps/Sound and Music. Story: Stephen Graham