Miles Apart, Close At Heart - An Online Collaboration
Hello! Hi! Hello!!
Gosh, it’s been a while! How are you? How’s little Timmy? Jolly good, jolly good.
You’d have thought in a global pandemic that opportunities to sit down at a computer and type would be plentiful, but the truth is we’ve been hard at work at Jack Drum Arts. Though for many the pandemic has been somewhat of a slowing of life, we’ve truly never stopped and have been busier than ever with online provision, activity packs, support groups, doorstep gigs and a myriad of other projects and pursuits within our local community and beyond.
Speaking of beyond, one of these projects came quite suddenly out of nowhere at the beginning of the year and has been a genuinely incredible experience to be a part of.
From the end of April and throughout May 2021, a small group of Young People from across our Youth Music Provision came together over the course of 6 weeks online to create and produce an album of original musical works with young people from The Youth Sayers, a London based Youth Band Project ran by Idris and Rob of The Soothsayers. The Soothsayers are a band renowned for their contributions to the UK afro-beat scene, brass implementation and their incredible live atmosphere, and having them take the lead on this project has been something really special.
Once a week for 6 weeks, the young people met over zoom to discuss music, share their ideas and influences, their common ground and also how their experiences throughout the pandemic have differed with one group being based in the heart of the city of London and the other in the rurally isolated areas of County Durham.
Outside of the instruments that each person played, it’s those contrasting experiences that in my eyes really shaped the music produced.
Throughout the week between each of these meetings, the two groups used an online service called Soundtrap as well as their own home-recording tools to develop the music based on what was discussed in the meetings. Each young person could save their own version of a project, and then in the following meeting the ideas were shared, mixed and matched, chopped, changed and in sum collated in to one project for the process to be repeated again.
This allowed for an incredible range of creative activity, from using external scoring programs like musescore and Sibelius, Virtual Instruments through Cubase right the way up to live recordings with a small computer interface or even phone recordings bounced down and imported in to each song.
That’s not to say that the process was easy however.
For all the great solitary composers the world has hosted in years gone by, I genuinely believe that writing music is fundamentally a collaboration. Bouncing ideas off of one another keeps the process fresh and engaging, it’s enriching and spontaneous. When you remove the spontaneity of sharing a room and the instantaneous feedback that environment brings, the actual creative process can be quite tiring- especially when a global pandemic has everyone already fatigued with online engagement in general. Some weeks the push was a little too much and the groups only got a little done (not for lack of enthusiasm, but sometimes the world is A Lot to deal with). Ultimately though, perseverance led to outstanding results with 4 songs recorded and mixed spanning a variety of genres from Afro-Beat to Dub to Samba.
The tracks will be linked here when uploaded to our Bandcamp Label (A very new and exciting development for our Youth Music Provision that I can speak more of at a later date) But for now, the title track “Miles Apart, Close At Heart” can be streamed worldwide on our Soundcloud page.