Artist News Releases

Eight new compositions to emerge in just one week via Bigo & Twigetti collaborative project

By | Published on Friday 21 August 2015

Bigo & Twigetti

Next week the Bigo & Twigetti label will be bringing together a stack of artists and collaborators to write, arrange, perform, record, edit and master an album from scratch in just seven days. Though it will be a special form of collaboration, in that each artist gets their own moment to move each track forward, before passing it on to the next musician.

We actually mentioned this when approving of Bigo & Twigetti’s Jim Perkins last month, and set to join him on the project next week are Antonymes, Beatrice Chaume, Chris Perren (Nonsemble), Leah Kardos, Lucy Claire, Richard Talbot (Marconi Union) and Tiny Leaves.

Perkins told CMU: “The original idea for this came from an EP I did about the notion of emergence in 2012. I met with this guy called David Yates, who was a doctor of philosophy at Kings specialising in emergence. I wanted to run some compositional ideas by him to see if, from what I’d read, I’d understood anything at all about what emergence means”.

He goes on: “So I explained that I would create some music, pass it to the animator Em Cooper, who would then respond with animation and send that back to me, and I would then change the music and pass it back to her to take the animation further, and we’d repeat this process several times. Once David had concurred that that was, indeed, a valid example of the processes used to produce emergent phenomena, I decided that was the process I would use for that EP”.

“And this idea of going back and forth a lot of times is one I now use a fair bit in collaborations with visual artists – as opposed to sending over a finished piece of music and asking them to make a video – it is time consuming, but the piece ends up more effectively integrated and connected, and in my experience the process produces a better piece of art than just making a video to a fixed piece of music”.

Which brings us to next week’s project. “I thought, what about creating an album in this way, but rather than just having two artists going back and forth, I thought it might be more interesting if the creators only got one chance each to add their input to the creative process. Obviously that would require many more composers and producers to take part. I also thought it would be more interesting to make this project very time limited, so that the creation had to be, to some extent, reactive/responsive/improvised, forcing composers to make quicker decisions and hopefully adding an energy and excitement to the music”.

And so that is exactly what will be happening next week. “We’ve tried to pick artists whose natural style fits with the aesthetic of the label” Perkins adds, “as we need to share it with an audience that will be interested in something like this. We did a test run in March with just three artists over 48 hours and the results were excellent. This time it’s on a larger scale with eight artists and eight tracks in a week”.

You can pre-order the final work – out on 31 Aug – on Bandcamp already. Plus there will be clips and videos from the project going online next week via the label and participating artists’ social media. Keep watching, this one should be very interesting.



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