Ep2 Cake and Runaway Cars - Alice Boyd-Taylor

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Luke 00:00:03  Welcome to episode two of the Impro Pod podcast. Today in the studio, I have Alice Boyd Taylor. Hi, Alice. Hello. What's your connection with improvisation? Are you an improviser?

Alice 00:00:16  So, yeah, I guess to a certain extent I'm an improviser. I've been experimenting quite recently, actually, but with the improvising through the medium of spoken words. I'll see if I can improvise a spoken word poem from some words that the person has given me. So I do enjoy the sort of playfulness and the unexpectedness of improvisation. So I guess a sort of connection to improvisation. Yeah.

Luke 00:00:45  So I'm going to play you a tune. I'm just going to make it up on the spot. Yeah. And I want you to tell me, what does that make you think of? Any kind of emotions, thoughts, ideas that come to mind? Okay.

Alice 00:02:04  So for me, the sort of opening chord of that I felt was like quite a warm chord. It was quite a warm place to be in. So I think it reminded me quite of like the sunshine and perhaps early summer or late spring sunshine, where it's like warm and and not really that chilly, but it's still kind of quite fresh then the, the faster, like lilting, like lyrical improvisation that kind of then took me to some something sort of quite aquatic or like maybe a stream or some like Tumbling Water.

Alice 00:02:39  And it was really interesting because then I started sort of finding myself following this stream on its own journey with the music. And there was a point where I started getting a bit lower, a bit more unsettled, and it felt almost like the sort of narrative of a stream towards the sea and the sort of tumbling of the rocks and the stronger force of the, of the water's it gets down there and it was definitely afternoon type time and it was quite a settled place in a moving way.

Luke 00:03:08  What was it that made you think about water?

Alice 00:03:10  Yeah, I guess like the notes themselves felt like they were kind of swirling and eddying in a similar way that a stream might be doing, like spiraling around each other a little bit, but in quite a sort of fast way, going a bit up and down and over here and round and twisting and playing with each other. It was quite playful and sort of spontaneous and fast in a sort of eddying way.

Luke 00:03:37  So I'm going to give you a word, and I want you to tell me a scene or a story based on that word.

Luke 00:03:43  And the word is cake.

Alice 00:03:46  Oh, yeah. Cake. Okay. I used to work in a cake shop, actually, which was a bit of a plot twist in my life, because that was never really my dream to become a cake shop worker, but, I sort of of that age of latter teens and trying to say if I'm not really that bothered by my job, but I ended up working in a cake shop with a fantastic part of a name called Cake Doodle Do. And I remember one morning in particular. It was Christmas Eve, and it was a really busy, day because we only had half a day and we're trying to pack the shop up for a long Christmas holiday. And I think I'd been to, like, some kind of party the night before, or late night shopping or something. I was not feeling the freshest I'd ever felt that day, and I had arrived with no time to eat breakfast beforehand, and I was just fading fast. And there was busyness happening left, right and centre.

Alice 00:04:43  And I was like, the only thing I can do right now to save myself from this sort of descent into hangover and overwhelm is to really quickly eat some cake. And so there I was, surveying all of these cakes and being like, what is the most breakfast like? And we had three tier Victoria sandwich cakes and three tier coffee and walnut cakes and chocolate brownies. And I was just like, they're all a bit too much to tackle right now. And then I looked at the brand new Christmas cake with like. And I was like, you know what that is exactly? That's gonna be the one. And, because it was so busy, I just had to eat this huge wedge of brandy Christmas cake and like three mouthfuls. And it was just it was just this fantastic way to eat cake, because you're kind of not meant to eat Christmas cake that way at like ten in the morning, massively hungover, really fast, pretending you're totally fine in front of your boss, but to do it because it's so not what you're meant to do just feels like, yeah, you know what, f the system.

Alice 00:05:51  This is so liberating. I can eat cake. However, I want, to say that it's my favorite cake story.

Luke 00:06:00  Well, I'm now going to create a piece of music based on your story out of nowhere. Right. So yeah, let's just see what happened to.

Alice 00:07:19  Oh, yeah, that was great. I felt like that captured definitely something of the cake journey. And I particularly love the ending, how it sort of ended on that really held but quite base note, which is kind of the cake settling down into the digestive system and grounding me. And it's reached a good, a good end point of grounded satisfaction.

Luke 00:07:42  I mean, I was sort of going for chaotic.

Alice 00:07:45  Yeah, I got that.

Luke 00:07:46  Chaotic in a cake shop, which was quite hard to do musically, but I kind of tried to make it a bit sugary or something. And then like, there's the moment of discovery.

Alice 00:07:55  Yeah, I heard.

Luke 00:07:55  That all of that noise and confusion just disappears because you've seen the cake and now you're thinking about it.

Luke 00:08:04  And then after that, I was kind of going for a moment of, should I do this? You know, it's the uncertainty. Yeah. Maybe this isn't the best course of action in the morning. You know.

Alice 00:08:14  This is what no one has ever recommended.

Luke 00:08:17  And then finally, it's like the triumphant kind of heart was a good idea, you know? Screw the system.

Alice 00:08:24  Ha ha ha ha. And it was actually really nice to have that sort of pause in the middle. And I definitely got that. That was sort of that key transition point from like disaster pre cake to sort of what's going to come next. And it was it gave the piece like a really nice sense of dynamics. That's quite pronounced variation in pace. I always feel like that gives a piece of music or whatever some real flavor, because it's the contrast between the fast and then the sort of silence really gave it a lot of good shape.

Luke 00:09:03  So if you've got another story, you see, what about cars?

Alice 00:09:07  Oh, a story about a car that is very bizarre and semi dramatic.

Alice 00:09:14  Elon had just got a new car. It was a black Audi and she parked the car up just like a sloped car park. We bought a ticket, got out, went to the beach. We're having like an evening barbecue at the beach. And then about 20 minutes later, our friends Sorrell and Nino turned up. The first thing they said when they met us on the beach, we're like, did you see that car in the hedge? We were like, no, that wasn't a car in the hedge fund. We were there and they're like, yeah, it literally plowed through the fence at the bottom and it ended up in a tree at the bottom of the car park. And we were like, what? That is insane. That's crazy. Then we were talking about it. How does that happen? How do you have a crash in a car park? And then at some point, Adam was just a bit like, what kind of car was it? And they were like, oh, it's a black Audi.

Alice 00:10:05  And Elon was like, oh dear Jesus, I think that's my car. And then we all went up to this car park, and it was her car that had ended up crashing through the fence at the bottom, and had saved itself from going into the beach by sort of going into a tree and being held in a tree. And to do that had gone through two rows of parked cars and had just somehow in a perfect straight line going down from where it was parked. There were gaps in the in the parked cars. So as it didn't actually crash into any car, it just gracefully slid through this gap in the parked cars, picking up momentum, crashed through the fence and ended up in a tree. There we were, all of us. Somehow we managed to actually push it down from the tree, get it in the car park. And this time Elon was like, I am really gonna yank on the handbrake. Lesson has been learned. Now escape has been hard. The car was fine.

Alice 00:11:13  I got a lift with Ellen back home in the same car. It was totally fine. It's just a very sort of crazy, bizarre situation to have happened.

Luke 00:11:22  All right, well, okay, here we go.

Speaker 3 00:12:50  Yeah, I left that.

Alice 00:12:52  I liked the, the journey. It went on as much. The journey of the story where it starts, like we're saying. And that's what the summertime by the sea. And it's really nice and relaxing. And then that very much sort of dissonant chaos of like, oh, God, that's a car that's in a tree. And the tumbling of the car going through the car park and that tumbling realization of, this is a very tricky situation, but it never felt totally sinister. It always felt like somewhat comical, because there wasn't ever a point where it was really scary, like, oh God, someone's going to get really hurt. It was always quite a comical situation, if a bit chaotic and a bit stressful. So I like that there wasn't that sort of undertone of darkness.

Alice 00:13:35  It was just this kind of dissonant tumbling, but quite funny. And then to sort of go through that, then end again in a sort of cyclical manner, to come back to a similar place where it begun. summertime by the sea and everything's fine again. Yeah.

Luke 00:13:52  It's interesting you pick that up. The difference. And so it's quite subtle difference sometimes between that like something that's comic and then what in music anyway.

Alice 00:14:02  Yeah. And even comedy itself almost I think works on something that's slightly uncomfortable. So the sort of subtle difference between comedy that's working on something that's slightly uncomfortable and that's what makes it funny and something that is just uncomfortable because it's scary to then do that through music to convey those different types of uncomfortableness. It is it is like going to be subtle. I guess it almost kind of had the narrative of like, what a novel story would be of like the beginning, the sort of building action of the shattering, the climax of the car tumbling, and then the sort of denouement of the, the resolution that we're back in a nice speech.

Alice 00:14:40  Okay.

Luke 00:14:42  One last story, I think.

Alice 00:14:44  Yeah. Three is the three is a magic number.

Luke 00:14:47  So the word for this story I'm thinking travel. How about a tropical travel story?

Alice 00:14:53  okay. Yeah. Tropical travel. I was traveling with some friends in Meghalaya and India, and we were staying in this sort of guest house, and we were like, let's go for a walk through the forest. So that's what we did. It wasn't like, you know, we weren't going crazily off the beaten track. Got down into this town, which actually was on the border to Bangladesh, and it was a market town, but we sort of arrived a bit late for the market. And I remember there being like loads of gods on the border because it's quite a troubled border, I guess, between India and Bangladesh. But anyway, I remember trying to then leave this town to get back to where we were staying because we just had totally underestimated how long the walk through this forest would take, and trying to hitch out of this town and like hours and walking along the road and eventually We got picked up by this pickup truck and it had like a singular giant jackfruit in the back.

Alice 00:15:53  And I just remember sitting in the back of this pickup truck, and it was fully dark by this point with, with my two friends and just sliding through the Indian Bangladesh border in the nighttime. And it was both very romantic and adventurous and also very, very strange that we were just gliding along with this jackfruit rolling about. And I don't think we even made it back that night. We just ended up in another town and that ended up staying. It was a very sort of random escapade, but for some reason this is another tropical country, this this image that I've forgotten for a while of like pickup truck jackfruit riding along some bumpy roads really came back like, that was a bizarre and pleasant moment. We didn't think we'd be gone for two days.

Luke 00:16:47  But. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker UU 00:16:49  All right. Music time then.

Speaker 3 00:18:36  Yeah, I just.

Alice 00:18:36  Really love that as a piece of music. It had a lot of depth to it and a lot going on. I liked how there was that sense of deep unease.

Alice 00:18:45  It wasn't an unsafe place I didn't feel like, but it was a very troubled place, and that gave it this edge. Army stops with guns, and you really convey that sort of dark energy that the other pieces obviously didn't have there, or they were a bit more comical. And I liked how you conveyed that darkness that carried across a lot more, and the fact that it was the nighttime as well. Yeah, I enjoyed that.

Luke 00:19:11  Can I go in for the they call it the harmonic minor scale. You see it in classics like Lawrence of Arabia.

Alice 00:19:18  It's like the archetypal sort of colonial exotic scale, but having.

Luke 00:19:25  Also.

Alice 00:19:25  Previously played musical instruments a lot more, that was always my favorite scale or things set in harmonic minor. There is a real niceness to them. It has sort of a unsettled sort of leading ness, like it's almost seeking a resolution, but also at the same time, it also feels a bit displaced. You almost don't expect it to quite go to that space.

Luke 00:19:52  Was there anything that you took away from from this session?

Alice 00:19:55  I love this, I had great fun.

Alice 00:19:57  Yeah, I just really reminds me of how fun playing with art forms and art mediums can be, how there's such a sort of spontaneous fun and excitement in improvisation. It's not this pre controlled idea of what it's going to be. It's very playful and spontaneous and a bit risky. And I just, I love sort of connecting to art through that kind of medium of, yeah. What's it going to do. Let's play around a bit. Let's see what happens. You know, you can't really go wrong because no one set any rules. And it's that it's that sort of lawlessness of it that I love.

Luke 00:20:32  Well, thanks very much. That was very insightful, Alice.

Alice 00:20:35  Yeah. Well thank you.

Luke 00:20:38  Join us next week for episode three of the Impro Pod podcast. Thanks for listening.