PIANO IMPROV
I began wanting to be a musician when I was about eight or nine years old, but didn’t want to leave my horror writing behind. As I got older, I learned, as long as I was diligent, that none of my arts had to be left hanging. Each one was possible, as long as my heart shuffled through each one, creating when that medium needed to be created.
As of now, there’s a piano in a basement. Sometimes, it’ll sound as though the television is on, or you’ll hear people speaking in the back, because, right now, all I have is a piano in the basement of my grandfather’s house.
There is no writing down of each song, which is recorded as it is written — meaning, each piece is improvisation. Every single one — no matter how terrible, no matter how good —, is improvised on a piano in the middle of a basement.
Someday, I might make it to a recording studio, but for now, this noise is one hundred percent live, and one hundred percent me sitting on concrete downstairs from where I live. If I had the money, sure, a recording studio would be nice, but I’m more of a starving artist, and therefore probably would end up not existing at all if I didn’t do what I do in a way that I can afford.
Maybe, someday, I’ll be able to live my dream of an ‘improv night’ at a nearby theater, where I play drums, guitar, piano, and sing a cappella for an hour to an hour and a half. As of now, I am nowhere near there, and that is just a dream that I dream about often.
Each bout of improv has about ten songs in it. They’re divided naturally. When I believe a song is done, I’ll stop playing and then press the stop button to stop recording. Then, I title it in which collection of improv is belongs in, and which number of improv in that collection it is. They’re numbered from oldest to newest. Sometimes, it takes me a few months to get a collection together. Other times, it takes much, much longer.
I’ve been known not to touch the piano for a month, and then regurgitate emotion all over the keys. Most of the time, the feeling to improvise amongst keys only happens when I’m going through things that need to be sorted through in my mind. It happens when I’m stressed, and need an outlet for the traumas that are haunting me.
The best way, if you have conversion disorder like I do, is to funnel panic attacks into tactile art rather than into seizures. Conversion disorder, particularly NEPS (Non-Epileptic Psychogenic Seizures), is more than difficult, especially when I’m in a place where I cannot really have a panic attack that displays itself as seizures, but learning how to funnel them into my work allows my traumas and I to heal.
The mere existence of this piano downstairs allows me to breathe into my traumas, and, because I release every single improv I create, you have music I’ve written from two years ago and have improved upon throughout ‘the ages’. Some of it is crap, and sometimes all of it is crap, but it’s the idea of self-evolution that pushes me to release everything, crap or not. It shows how I’ve evolved as a pianist, performer, and artist.
I call my style ‘classical industrial’, and are the most influenced by the French music project, Life’s Decay, and by the cabaret project, The Dresden Dolls. One of my biggest influences is Amanda Palmer and songs like, ‘Trout Heart Replica’ and ‘Girl Anachronism’, whose work has taught me just how emotive music can be. I also am broadly influenced by Philip Glass, whose concert I saw many years ago, and bawled my eyes out through because I had never had an experience quite like that one before.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to use classical industrial music to show you, my audience, the same sort of emotivity this music has inspired me to try to show. There is also electro-industrial music available, which has been written on my computer with as much care as my piano.
