Ep3 Rooftops and India - Ben Boyd Taylor

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Luke 00:00:05  Welcome to episode three of the Impro Pod podcast. Today in the studio I have Ben Boy Taylor. So Ben is Alice's brother from episode two. What's your relationship with improvisation? Are you a musical person?

Ben 00:00:19  I had music lessons when I was a child. I had violin lessons and guitar lessons. I've been in a choir for a while, but I wouldn't say I'm a musical person. I'm not playing an instrument at the moment, but I do listen to a lot of music and go to cool off gigs. So yeah, I feel like it's going to be quite different to my to My Sister's podcast because she's much more musical than me.

Luke 00:00:41  Okay, so I'm going to play you a piece of music which is just completely made up, and I want you to tell me what that makes you think of. So it could be an image, it could be some sort of emotion, could be something happened to you. Anything. Really.

Ben 00:00:55  Okay. Yeah, that was interesting. I felt like initially I had an image of Autumn and someone was looking out the window and there was rain, and they were a bit kind of isolated, I guess, but then it shifted.

Ben 00:01:51  It was kind of a bit more joyful. It was like sun coming out from behind the clouds. There was movement. It felt like there was something sort of moving, which was, you know, which could have also been water or something.

Luke 00:02:02  So had a water kind of quality to it.

Ben 00:02:06  Yeah. There was a sort of rhythm and there was particular notes that were quite high. Somehow it felt kind of like rain, and it didn't feel summery to me.

Luke 00:02:17  So are you up for telling me a story? Okay. Yeah, sure. Was anything that you could imagine a soundtrack on?

Ben 00:02:23  So just what a moment from my life. Or just something I've seen that could have a soundtrack to it? Yeah, okay. This seems quite random, but this was the thing that popped into my head. So a few years ago, I was traveling in India. I was in this village on a Sunday, and this was a very Christian area of India. The buses and jeeps in that area were very limited at that point, where you can wait five hours for the next Jeep, or you can get on the roof of this Jeep.

Ben 00:02:49  So I was like, okay, I'm just going to get on the roof of this Jeep. Thing is, is it wasn't like a normal road. It was a rocky road with a sheer drop on the side and low hanging branches. So often you're just trying to dodge the branches. It was. It was crazy. I hadn't realized what I was signing up for, and then I got to my destination, and I was trying to get further than that, and I was stuck in the same problem. So I kind of felt under a bit of pressure. I really need to get to this city, but how do I get there? And the person I stayed with, he said, oh my, my mates got a motorbike, he could drive you there. He's going that way. So then I got on the back of this motorbike with my large rucksack. We just drove an hour, a few hours on the back of this motorbike with this huge rucksack. If I'd given it much thought, I'd be like, no, I'm not doing that.

Ben 00:03:33  This is crazy. Going on the back of my motorbike with no helmet on these horrible roads. What are you doing, Ben? But it was. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Yeah.

Luke 00:03:46  When I think about a piece of music, I try and split it up into different points of the narrative. The same thing you do when you score a film, you could start with, say, confusion as and you don't know what's happening, what's going on with this bus station. There's limited transport and then you have a moment of clarity, and then there's this comic but dangerous journey that ensues. Yeah, okay, here we go then.

Ben 00:06:02  It was very much this sense of movement. Again, there was moments where it was quite scary because of the sheer drops and stuff, but I found the experience quite exciting. I wasn't focusing on it, and in that there was moments where it was some sort of fear, but the fear didn't dominate. It was just like a little motif that came in, and then there was more of a feeling of excitement and kind of wander.

Ben 00:06:23  But for me, it conveyed definitely a sense of adventure. The piece.

Luke 00:06:26  I mean, if I was to do it again would be anything that you say to improve it. Or was there anything that struck you as not quite working.

Ben 00:06:34  I guess is those moments. The whole piece was kind of seamless. It kept going, whereas in my experience the event was it was like, okay, I'm, I have to make this decision. So it was kind of like there was pauses almost where I was trying to make up my mind. Then I would go and in those pauses, there was quite a lot of like thoughts going through my mind. I wasn't totally afraid of what was going to happen, but I was just like, oh, do I, should I go for this? Or should I just wait five hours for the for the next one? Is this the right thing? I guess there was a bit of anxiety beforehand, but while I was on the roof, I wasn't really scared. Yeah, the only thing I wondered was was the time of day, because it felt very much like it happened at night.

Ben 00:07:14  I didn't wasn't really sure if I could hear it. It was night. In a way.

Luke 00:07:18  It's actually quite a hard concept to get right with just a piano, but it's an interesting one. Maybe you could use that as a next theme for a story. Do you have something which has an unusual time of day, or something that happened at a weird time, or even just time? Okay, it's a theme.

Ben 00:07:34  Something that happened at a weird time. I remember being at university, this was a UEA and outside where I lived there was these flat roofs and we weren't allowed to go on the flat roofs, Reeves, but we sometimes we would. That was a night where we just took close the chairs up to this flat roof and just sat outside playing tunes and drinking and stuff, and every now and then security, they would come round in their vehicle and we would just duck down, be like, okay, we need to get out the way. Security is coming. But it was really nice.

Ben 00:08:03  Yeah, it was a very memorable evening and night really.

Luke 00:08:07  Haha. And it was something about the fact that it wasn't really loud that improved it. You think?

Ben 00:08:13  Yeah, definitely. That was half the fun. Avoiding security and the risk that we could actually be told off for doing it.

Luke 00:08:20  So I'm just going to go for the vibe, you know, sitting on the rooftop. I guess it's just early hours of the morning. So yeah. Did you see the sun rise?

Ben 00:08:30  Yeah, we saw it rise over the lake. And I remember around sunrise I saw we saw a few animals. I saw some monk track deer. I saw a fox just wandering around campus. Because of the students, you just generally don't see them so close to where the students are. Yeah, I felt like that all sorts happened in there. There were moments where I felt like I could feel the sun coming up. I was kind of moving from deeper notes to sort of lighter notes, almost like bird songs.

Ben 00:10:25  Yeah. But also I was thinking about what you were saying about time, how it's quite hard trying to convey timing in terms of a time of day and a piece of music.

Luke 00:10:41  So I think one last story. So are there any themes or emotions that come to mind?

Ben 00:10:45  I could go with an emotion, right?

Luke 00:10:47  Confusion.

Ben 00:10:49  Confusion. Okay. One night stand. I'll go with that. Seeing someone, you have a lovely evening with them. And then through that experience, you actually feel like you have more feelings for them than you were intending. But obviously it's just nothing's going to happen with it. They don't feel the same way. That's quite a confusing place, really.

Luke 00:11:10  Okay, so you talk about the kind of attachment there, you know, or possibly that's that's more one sided. Yeah.

Ben 00:11:17  Yeah. And that element of trying to say this is just a one night stand, I don't want to fall for this person. But sometimes that you still can develop feelings through that. It's like, we can't stop that being feelings, you know? Okay.

Luke 00:11:31  So basically you've got an evolution between what something was kind of fun and something that was spontaneous. And then that becomes more serious on one end. And then there's this kind of sense of not sure where we stand here, maybe.

Ben 00:11:46  Yeah. And confusion. It's like I can imagine like more happening with this person. But actually that's not going to happen. And I know that I'm trying to tell myself that's the reality, but my emotions are telling me that they want something different. They don't want to listen to that reason.

Luke 00:11:59  Okay, I will see what I can do. So what did you think of that?

Ben 00:14:12  Yeah, what I liked was it wasn't totally heartbroken, like, because some bits where it's like, okay, that's just soppy and heartbroken, but there was a sense of joy and excitement at the beginning. And then that was kind of feeling more of conflict later on. Whether that's conflict with yourself or just to the two of you feel differently. The bit I was wondering about. I didn't really hear.

Ben 00:14:33  It was kind of that passion. It feels like there's a sort of build up, and then there's this moment of passion, and then it's kind of this different bit.

Luke 00:14:40  Okay, that's interesting. I'll give it another go then. Let's try this. Is actually really hard to do.

Ben 00:16:41  Yeah, no, I definitely got more of a sense of it that time.

Luke 00:16:44  Yeah, the narrative of the story made more sense with the music.

Speaker 3 00:16:47  Yeah. All right. Yeah.

Luke 00:16:50  I think they will call it a day there. So what did you feel you got out of the podcast?

Ben 00:16:56  I, I feel like it was just thinking about music in a different way. Like, I don't often have an opportunity to kind of just sit down and think about musical composition because I'm I'm not someone who composes music myself. It's quite interesting thinking about that. I do that with film and with photography, but I don't do it so much in music.

Luke 00:17:13  And I think when making films is this whole relationship between the composer and the director and how the director tries to portray the vision across, and you have this kind of conversation that happens.

Ben 00:17:25  Yeah, because we're talking about conveying time. Well, in a film the images convey that time of day. So it's like the music works with that, but it's not having to completely convey that because it's also got the visuals alongside it. Whereas when you're just composing a piece, you're having to create the visuals from the piece, and it's quite hard to that idea of like using music to plant a visual in someone's mind, because it's not like writing and visuals, it's much more overt the meaning, whereas the music, there's a lot more interpretation. Different people would hear different stories in it, you know? And I guess that's kind of the beauty of it. You never completely convey the same message to everyone, and everyone kind of has that puts their own meaning on it.

Luke 00:18:11  Well, thank you very much. It's been very insightful. Yeah.

Ben 00:18:14  Thank you for this experience. It's a worthwhile venture exploring composition.

Luke 00:18:18  Join us next time for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.