Player development…

Up until now, the improvisation-focused collaborations I’ve been a part of have either started with a performance (“wow, let’s keep doing that”), or with a couple of rehearsals leading into a performance (“hey, let’s take this to the stage”). It turns out there’s a third way - start rehearsing, keep rehearsing, workshop new and purpose-built instruments and tools, rehearse some more, develop a bunch of different modes and strategies for playing together, did I mention rehearsing, and then finally step out into public some eighteen months later.

That third strategy also provides time for things like building a DIY television studio and recording a heap of live performance videos. And with the first of those videos, percussionist Dennis Sullivan and I are introducing our (not exactly) new project, G LEAGUE IGNITE.

There are several more of these recordings waiting in the wings - so this newsletter will publish more frequently and more regularly for a while (every-other-week is the plan), and I’ll have much more to say about G LEAGUE IGNITE in upcoming editions. (Including some attempt at explaining our ridiculous choice of name. Maybe).

The zany folks who make the Tabs Out podcast named Dr. Peter J. Woods’ thoroughly antic Learning by Listening Vol. 9: Learning to Make Noise: Toward a Process Model of Artistic Practice within Experimental Music Scenes as their top-ranked cassette of 2025. As one of Peter’s five collaborators on this project, I am hereby claiming that I am precisely one-sixth of the Artist of the Year.

Seriously, though, give the record a spin - it is a madcap delight. (And if you want to know a bit more, I wrote about it at greater length in a previous edition of this newsletter).

After years of procrastination, I finally set up a proper domain name for my website: christopherburnsmusic.com. The site hasn’t changed much, but hopefully it’s now a bit easier to find.

Much love to sfsound.org for serving as my internet space for decades - not to mention being the organizational umbrella gathering many of my dearest friends and longest-running collaborators. I’m still an sfSounder at heart.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve been elbow-deep in audio mixing and video editing, getting all of this new G LEAGUE IGNITE material ready for release. I’ve engineered all of the audio recordings that Dennis and I have made over the past eighteen months, which means there’s always extra work in post-production as I find out what actually got captured. But this particular session (recorded in January) was our smoothest yet. We’ve gradually increased the number of separate tracks we’re using to record Dennis’ setup - starting from “stereo out from Dennis’ mixer” and arriving at independent captures of microphones, electronic drum pads, effects pedals, and modular synthesizer. While that’s created some complexity in the setup (using every single aux send and effects loop available, ganging together multiple hardware audio interfaces, etc.), it offers way more flexibility in constructing a balanced and clear mix.

It’s also just plain more fun to work with, and helps me take advantage of classic mixing strategies for rock music like “make a submix for the drums, and then apply compression [aka smoothing of dynamics/loudness] to the percussion as a set.” Of course, there are still details to take care of after that:

On the video side, there’s been some remembering-how-to-do-it (cut as the percussionist starts their motion, not as they finish their strike!), and some learning-how-to-do-it (my color grading is still a work in progress). I’ve enjoyed thinking about these videos as narratives - how best to illustrate the form of the music? Where to direct the viewer’s attention? How many edits will make the visuals dynamic but not distracting? - and it’s been a pleasure to dwell at length inside music that was originally made in an extended moment.

Thanks as always for listening and reading (and if you are in the US Northeast, wishing you a pleasant snow day) - yours,

Christopher

Christopher Burns
christopherburnsmusic.com