Fyrm Fouroux
Joined: 15 Dec 2007
Posts: 455
Location: North East of England
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 Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 10:43 pm Post subject: Djai Skjellerup and Fyrm Fouroux explore back-to-back shows |
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Hi! This isn't a notice about a forthcoming gig, since we played it yesterday - lol. But when we were chatting afterwards, we decided it would be worth putting a short note up on SLMC here to let everyone know what we have been up to.
Djai and I have long been interested in one another's music. We both feel that we are singers/composers coming from the same stable, as it were, even though we play different instruments (well... more of that later). We are both committed to writing original material but accept that it is also nice to toss an occasional cover into our sets. And we are both English. This might sound a bit obvious, but I do think there are differences in musical cultures between North America and Europe, even though it could be argued that more or less all popular music has been influenced by the history of music in the States.
We decided to play a two hour show at my little Terra Fyrmusica venu. I kicked off at noon SLT while Djai put his kids to bed in rl (for us, we are talking about 8 - 10 pm in our evening), and then Djai finished off in the second hour. I think this worked really well for a couple of fairly simple reasons. Djai was able to talk about what I was singing from his perspective as a fellow composer and I was then able to do the same for him. This kept a musical thread flowing on the local chat screen in a way that it is not always easy to do in solo gigs. Secondly, we benefitted from a cross-over between our fan bases with some of Djai's regulars coming to hear me for the first time and some of mine getting to hear Djai. This is a fairly important thing for us to explore, since original songwriters/singers tend to get relatively small audiences in our experience.
For about a month now I have been slipping a keyboard section into my show (I put about 20 minutes worth into the middle of the hour). I have been very tentative about this, and it was great to get encouragement from Djai (whose style of piano playing I very much enjoy). It has made me more determined to work on that side of my music and, who knows, maybe 2009 will see me composing on piano.
At present we have no plans to collaborate in performance (we are not going down the path of ninjams). However, I feel that we might be able to integrate the two contributions more fully. My feeling is that now we have everything organised and have proved that it works well, we could possibly switch stream fairly frequently, perhaps taking it in turns to play a couple of songs each. And I would not be averse to planning a joint songlist for the 2 hour session. I mean, we both write out a songlist beforehand anyway, so it would not be much of a hassle to email each other and try to look for song-topic themes.
To sum up, we have for some time been very interested on each others' music and we took the step to provide a back-to-back collaboration. We feel it worked really well and we hope to take this idea forward again sometime in the new year.
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Real life website http://www.lewismusic.co.uk
Blog http://fyrmfouroux.wordpress.com/ |
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