This is for you. Kaffe Matthews. 2005

Work for “Playing John Cage” Exhbition. Arnolfini , Bristol.

Media : red leather chaise longue, stitched text label, suspended branches.

I am considering a future with no recorded music.

In the summer, I was improvising with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for three nights. Each night with two other musicians I had never played with before, following an instruction to take our own paths and not play together for the seventy-two minutes duration. Each night unable to see the dancers performing a different choreography on a stage above our heads, with each night a different décor. Each night, the audience only became visible when we stood formally to receive their rapturous applause as Merce appeared.

It was on the second night that I had this incredible feeling, this is it. This is the way to do it. Here we are, making this music together for the first time, out into this space as these dancers are making their movements that we can’t see, and the only people witnessing the whole are all those people out there, all those individuals in that big carpeted space, sitting en masse, silently pulling together these collisions as moments of information, now and now and now; assimilating their own meanings and stories, subconscious or otherwise, through all their varied perceptive mechanisms. And this will never come again, and neither can this be captured or repeated or documented in any way. This is living.

I write this as my neighbour’s morning jazz filters through behind, the traffic weaves soft lines down below, a studio sharing colleague flops past in sandals and the tap tapping of my fingers pops rhythms into that heavanly descending aeroplane tone that regularly falls.

This moment of music that you feel through vibrations of the air, this air that enables us, will never come again.

Kaffe Matthews.