Ep22 Growing up and the Anatomy of music - Rowland O’Conner

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Luke 00:00:05  Welcome to another episode of the Improv Pod podcast. Today in the studio, I have Roland O'Connor. So what's your relationship with improvisation?

Rowland  00:00:14  As very well know, I'm a big fan. Started off the big water jam night that's been going, what, six years now? I love it, but I think especially the idea that things can just come out of nowhere, which you can then develop and record and make something out of a moment where there wasn't something before, I think. I think improvisation also makes you very much in the moment. Whereas sometimes if you're playing in bands and you're playing songs that you've played an awful lot, you go into automatic playing and you're disappearing into other places or whatever. Tell us about The Jam. It started off in London, actually, and where I was just doing a jam night, and then I realized that I wanted to make it as improvised as possible. I feel like having very simple kind of rules allows creativity to really flourish within that. I find that in all kinds of creativity.

Luke 00:01:03  And to play a piece of music. And I want you to tell me what it makes you think of in terms of any thoughts, emotions, ideas that come into your mind kind of thing. All right. What did you think of that? I mean, you could be as honest as you like.

Rowland  00:02:09  Started off with a real sense of dread and foreboding, something ominous, but then very quickly resolved that really nicely. I think my mind was trying to go to somewhere imagery wise, and I instantly went to part of the moors, because I think it's easy to picture something beautiful and landscape when it comes to that, but actually it's less about that for me at the moment. It's more about the emotional journey to. It made me think of Gershwin as well. Obviously, he was known to play a jazz chord or two on the piano, but he's been on my mind and there was certain aspects that I think we're in. What's that really famous? One of his is it Rhapsody? And not that it sounded derivative at all.

Luke 00:02:43  So do you see music in terms of visual imagery?

Rowland  00:02:47  Always. I think for me it stays more in a feeling sort of thing. Sometimes I see imagery. One thing I found interesting I never had a conversation about is that often when I'm practicing learning a piece or something, if I'm thinking about a certain person or a certain situation or something personal or something like that. For some reason I dwell on it, and then playing that piece later on, that same thing pops up. I wonder how much music brings the images with it and how much you attach things, but it's interesting to take things from the subconscious and make them conscious. And I think that's what music is really good at. Often there's so many things floating around our brain and little thoughts and feelings, and sometimes music can bring that to the surface. And I think what you did beautifully with that song there for me unwittingly, is to bring me from a place of feeling dread to actually resolving it really beautifully.

Luke 00:03:39  I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to break the story down into sections, and then improvise a piece of music to the story.

Rowland  00:03:51  When I was younger, I had a really good friend still do. He was my best man when I got married this year. We were both geeks when we first started out, but we're both still geeks. Yeah. We did Warhammer made model ships and things like that. He was always very good at painting him, and I was slapdash because I wanted to just make him and then play with them, and we played with them a bit and recreated sort of famous battleship things. And then when we got a little bit older, it got a bit boring. And my dad had some air guns, so he basically took them out into the garden and shot the shit out of them with with air rifles, which was a lot of fun. He had a Titanic, which he was so proud of, had it up on his shelf. And then a few years later, we were blowing the hell out of it with two two and 177 air rifles. So that's my story. When we were children, we were being a bit more adult and geeky, and then when we got older, we got more childish.

Rowland  00:04:38  That's an interesting juxtaposition for you to play with.

Luke 00:04:40  How old were you like in your 30s?

Rowland  00:04:42  Early 20s, I think. Okay, maybe teens, but I think early 20s. Yeah. And then when we didn't have enough of that, we got some Lego and built Lego and smashed that out of it.

Luke 00:04:50  But such is this age thing. How do you portray age in music?

Rowland  00:04:54  I suppose you could look at something very nursery rhyme and simple to show the sort of the age youth, but then maybe done in a really good way. Probably some Mozart is quite good for that, isn't it? But then at the same time, we're looking not quite as sophisticated as Mozart. But you're not either. Okay, that's that's really. And then later on, maybe a bit more of a, I don't know, more complex but fun, that sort of juxtaposition between age and maturity and not necessarily going the right way. I'd say Mozart's a pretty good source of reference for it. You modulate it too much? Yeah, I started off in a good place.

Rowland  00:07:25  It started off in that simple, childish sort of thing, taking things maybe a bit too seriously, but also being quite childish. The interesting thing was I was like, how are you going to do that? That's two quite opposite things being young, a bit more sensible and old and a bit sillier. And how do you get from place to place like that and actually where you went, which I think was very wise, was went to a dark place in order to pivot that. And that makes perfect sense. You're a child, you don't have any worries in the world. You take yourself really seriously. Then loads of taxes and relationships come and get in the way. And then suddenly actually, do you know what? Let's just get our guns and shoot up to these silly things that we thought seriously about because life's too short. Yeah, I thought it was really good.

Luke 00:07:58  I struggled a little bit to get the sense of growing up with the sense of also not growing up in terms of, but I think.

Rowland  00:08:05  It's a sense of growing up. But then it's the shooting things is like a reaction to growing up. That's not part of us growing up. That's part of us getting away from growing up. I feel like that's how people balance the seriousness of being older is by getting drunk to be silly and forget about it all. But yeah, maybe more healthy option is air rifles and and model ships.

Luke 00:08:30  So do you think another story or something with contrast.

Rowland  00:08:33  Lines drawing a blank? I'm more thinking of like emotions and places that I'm at, rather than a story with a beginning, middle and end.

Luke 00:08:40  Okay. So if you give us an idea of emotion.

Rowland  00:08:43  I think that I'm thinking a lot about I work a lot with Greenpeace. The world we're in at the moment, we've got this sort of climate change craziness going on and most of the world not really caring about it. And even if they don't, what more can they do about it? And a lot of the world is in this sort of consumerist, capitalist sort of culture, and also me being like yourself really into music and technology and liking microphones and computers and all these different things.

Rowland  00:09:10  It's a lot to manage.

Luke 00:09:11  I guess there's the paradoxical element, of course. You're working in a recording studio. You think, how do they get these minerals and gold? There's a lot of stuff that goes into making this kit. Yeah, and to extract it. Quite. Yeah.

Rowland  00:09:24  We're not consuming it at the same rate as a lot of other things. Phones and especially vapes, which is a big thing for Greenpeace at the moment. And these things, they use batteries. People mined them up and then they're just getting thrown away. The powers that be could be putting a lot more into recycling, but they're not because it doesn't make as much money. It's just the fact that money is driven by everything. But at the same time, I'm driven by money. I have to be, I guess, trying to balance the needs of things with being responsible and also trying to just enjoy your life.

Luke 00:09:51  Could you talk about that kind of emotion of the paradox that experience?

Rowland  00:09:55  The experience is feeling the feeling like I need to feel responsible.

Rowland  00:09:58  I should be responsible for what we do as we live in a first world country. And although we're not the richest of the country, we're of the richest in the world. And just balancing feeling like you need to do something with also being responsible for your own self, your own sanity, your own well-being, and being able to lead a good life, and also being able to look after your family.

Speaker 3 00:11:41  Yeah.

Rowland  00:11:42  It started in a dark place, which is understandable. I really like that. That was my mind trying to work out lots of complicated things, and then every chord was like looking at it from a different perspective and trying to put that into a place. I was hoping that it was going to happen, was going to sort of fade into sort of blissful happy bit where I'm going into nature and what I'm forgetting about it or I'm integrating it. I've come to some sort of resolution. That's still what I'm hoping for my life as well. So it ties in. That's how I feel a lot, and that's how a lot of people feel is stuck in thinking these things, like, how are we getting to this place? And still very little as being done.

Rowland  00:12:17  There's got to be a way that we can do it. There's got to be a reason for it. There's got to be trying to make some sense out of it, getting stuck in, trying to make sense out of it.

Luke 00:12:23  I was to ask you to record some guitar with with that in mind, that slightly paradoxical thing about, you know, we've got to do something about this planet and this thing where I still need to exist and make money. And yeah, you know.

Rowland  00:12:35  I, I don't think I'd do it as much justice as you're doing it because I've not been playing guitar very much, even at the jam nights. I feel like I'm just not right there at the moment making my record. And and I'm much more in having had the ideas and developing them and getting parts exactly right. So I think I could do that really well. But I wouldn't be able to do it improvised like that. But I'm interested what you're doing there. How are you processing that? What's your thought process? Between what I've said and.

Luke 00:13:03  Most of the time, I try and think about as little as possible to start with. It's like the big thing. There's some kind of issue here. And then that kind of little melodic thing is like a nagging thought. I took the sort of same theme and then change the harmony around a bit, but I do find it quite difficult to analyse too many things at once. I find the music is less effective. What do you mean.

Rowland  00:13:26  By too many things at once?

Luke 00:13:27  So if I was thinking about, well, what could he be going through right now? All of this stuff that's to do with how your family is responding, its relationship with technology. I started thinking about all of that stuff. Then I can't really play. In fact, even that idea that there's a lot going on, that's that's enough.

Rowland  00:13:44  Yeah. Yeah. I suppose the idea of music is to simplify that somehow, isn't it? Take all that and just make it simpler and just take it away.

Luke 00:13:51  I did find there's like a kind of mental discipline that you have to go through in terms of getting the clarity of my mind, but also thinking about what I'm trying to do.

Luke 00:14:02  You feel like you have a purpose, so thinking about that, but also not trying to go too deep into it.

Rowland  00:14:08  Do you think in terms of chords and like going to minor and major for happy and sad and things like that?

Luke 00:14:12  Sometimes there's a practical kind of side of my brain kicks in. That's an interesting process when you're dealing with your knowledge of music and also sometimes lack of knowledge. I haven't studied that particular type of music. So you just come up with something.

Rowland  00:14:27  The whole balance between thinking and not thinking is one of the greatest challenges of music, really. It's like how much you thinking about it and how much you're just letting it flow. And I don't think there's any conclusive proof as to what the answer is to all of that.

Luke 00:15:48  The piece you played me reminded me of a forest. Not much happening. Tranquil environment.

Rowland  00:15:54  Nice. Yeah, that's that's a good vibe to put across. When I play acoustic, if you just hold the open E or the open A, it just puts a nice bass on it.

Rowland  00:16:02  So I do a lot of playing in E major and major and just messing around on that and just seeing what happens. I changed quite a bit and modulate it slightly, because I'm thinking a bit more about writing like jazz progressions, and so I think a bit closer to being able to do that than I normally am. I normally just stay in one key, but what I was thinking about, not anything specific, more emotions and feelings and feeling how I was going. It tends to stay quite non-specific for me. I have to try in order to make something specific for us. Is a good one. Yeah, like that sort of thing that you'd feel in a beautiful green, lots of sunlight falling through the trees.

Luke 00:16:40  So what did you get out of this podcast?

Rowland  00:16:44  No, I've got a lot from it is. I'm really enjoying being here. I'm glad you're doing this.

Luke 00:16:50  Thank you very much for being on the podcast. Join us again next week for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.