Hi!
Nice to find this thread this morning! I've just got here to try and write some down on this tiny keyboard on my phone in my garden.
I'm an experimental musician (among other things) with a studio in Stokes Croft's Coexist in Bristol, where I work partly to put together a hackspace for Bristol. A hackspace is a kind of electronics and fabrication oriented shared warehouse and event space for inventing things and to run courses and events. Hackspace members have already made some interesting electronic like these pisano bikes: http://code.google.com/p/pisanomatic/, and I am trying to make an outdoors installation of sensors for Maker Faire in Newcastle so that temperature is drone, nocturnal soil moisture readings make melody and charge is length of the piece. I have no idea if it will work!
(Ok now I have moved to the laptop, after much faffing...) My last project, in December was called Green Noise Experiment at the Arnolfini Art Centre here in Bristol where I played people green noise versus white and pink. Green noise is a filtered white noise that is mostly around the 500hz range, which is very much like the sound of a waterfall, flock of birds or a boiler even - an ambient sound which can sound both urban and natural. I put people in a hypnagogic state by covering their eyes with ping pong ball halves in a darkened part of the gallery while they listened to green noise for 10 or 20 minutes at a time. This created a very pleasurable, somehow spiritual experience involving sensory distortion, dreamlike experiences and strong relaxation for lots of people whilst at the same time they listened to what in other circumstances might be seen as pure noise.
As a musician, I think being in the post peak society means being able to be a truly multimedia artist doing your own album covers, and even casing, posters, tickets, stamps, sorting out the sound and even videoing concerts and producing them, because all this is now available at a small scale for diy production both in software and hardware.
On another level I personally feel it's about letting go of centralised band or group structures in favour of loose associations of people or organisations where everyone just participates in some way. Through collective or self organised decision making a different sort of music emerges, frequently dictated by subconscious or learned changes and responses between musicians as people play. The poetic, spoken aspect and the content of any words can also be influenced by these changes in structure, although a lot of it I think will always be a personal expression, and I recently created an improvisation score where performers could choose any one of Holmgren's 12 laws of permaculture and follow it or use it as inspiration or direction for a minute at a time.
I am one of a few core members of the Orchestra Cube in the Cube Cinema, another autonomous art space in Bristol. It's a free participative orchestra where anyone can turn up and play or suggest collaborations and ideas. On Sunday, I hope, orchestra members will play the incidental sounds for a Buster Keaton film, where children will be given balloons and newspaper to make more sound effects with, and encouraged to bring instruments to join in with, while Buster is chased around on a bike by a gang of kidnappers.
We have been going for almost 6 years and in that time we've been to many places including the Sunrise Gathering where we really didn't fit in - our music is urban and strange, not always bright or happy, and certainly more of an exploration of exercises than a folk outfit. There is an interesting bunch who have met in the beautifully echoey St Stephens Church in Exeter who improvise melodically and are made of whoever turns up much like us, but who are more acoustic and are called Children of the Drone. They publish all their music in Creative Commons Licensed collections on Archive.org and sound like a beautiful campfire experience. (Back at the festival, we ended up regrouping together with Saz playing Droner, (and mathematician) Matthew and played some acoustic sets which went down a lot better).
Musically I love improvised music and I play an uzbek lute as well as tabla and guitar and I think it's a great form of expression and basis for creativity as opposed to rehearsing a written piece - and gives a lot of release and expression, many times a basis for writing these pieces for other people to practice. I think improvising is very close to some people due to the ability for personal expression it gives and this campfire aspect, the shared creativity thing, in it's many different shapes and sizes. I think a lot of modern expectations of music that is ecological in some way have roots in the 100 years or so during which recordings have been accessible in some way, before which things must have been quite different, and needed someone to actually travel to where you were. Other things that might stop but also might alter music in a huge way now are the coming and present migrations bringing new music with them and mixing with what is there at the fringes. The quick air and car travel might change this radically, and we might once again be amazed to see some exotic musicians passing through the area as a unique phenomenon instead of a passing convenience.
I love the urban sounds of the city and how that noise and intensity comes out in the music people make here in Bristol. I think we are going to see much more non standard recordings with these local bands - using novel media beyond CDs or USB keys, and eventually sound generated and produced using novel means even just out of necessity, such as using natural amplification rather than electrically powered, and using many other changes in instrument making and the way media is distributed and venues and events are run. All these things are going to be influenced by cultural and economic change as the world runs out of the things it needs in it's production and consumption today.
We use this really expensive recording and performing equipment for example, made in factories around the world with ugly conditions and diseases for workers. A good side of this huge pile of gadgets we find ourselves in is that in these past 50 years we have enormously decreased the cost of this equipment and electronics available in the world will be valuable to us still for some time according to how inventive we can be with it all. I think telecommunications and the ability to send or hear music across long distances - a 20th century technology which I think will still be around in the far future in some way or other. All the unsustainable production methods, materials and mining however might soon or already be slowing down or stopping, so I think it's crucial that the next step for artists be to keep following a path of green production and creativity deeper and deeper across all aspects of what they do.
Here are some links about all this in case you want to join in with any of it and are in the area:
http://www.childrenofthedrone.net/
http://orchestra.cubecinema.com/
http://www.craftivism.net/wiki/GreenNoise
http://bristol.hackspace.org.uk/
Hope to hear more about people's perception of green/ecologically oriented music, a very interesting subject!
Ale