After a few months of slacking, i've updated the Skelly Gang music page.

I'm tempted to just send you there with no further explanation and ask for feedback as I think the music stands well enough on its own, but i also want to sort of try to explain what Skelly Gang music is.

Frank Zappa had a phrase for "instant composition" which is really just a fancy way of saying improvisation. He actually said it in reference to his live guitar solos in concert (which he would then take home, extract from the rest of the song, and then build totally new songs around. that's what his Shut Up and Play Your Guitar series is), but i think "instant composition" is a good name for what we do.

Even in jazz improv, there are certain basic chord progressions that everyone is expected to know, plus by nature of the fact that jazz is a specific genre there are certain rules you know you are going to follow. When the rules start going out the window, you wind up with Ornette Coleman type stuff which is interesting to some people and "noise" to others, but even people who like it don't keep it on heavy rotation on their iPods.

What (i hope) differentiates us from that is the free form music we create starts off with almost no pre-arrangement, even on a basic chord progression level, and winds up being listenable, at least to people with certain tastes (i would say our closest analogues are early instrumental Pink Floyd, the live jams of the Velvet Underground, and the longer psychedelic epics of "Krautrock" bands like Can and Amon Duul. Not that we strive to sound like anything in particular.) It's not that we have some sort of pretentious aversion to "rules" and delve off into some no-wave dissonance that no one would ever want to listen to. We all have a wide range of musical listening behind us and so we each bring to the mix the "rules" of the hundreds of genres we are familiar with. Someone will start something, generally out of thin air, and we mix all our ideas together and play what works. Sometimes someone will bring their own chord progression or an idea they've been working with as a starter, and sometimes we'll work with loops that Mike has created. And sometimes after a song has been recorded, we'll go back and quickly overdub another set of parts, but even then it's spur of the moment - none of the laborious orchestrating associated with "writing songs". But for the most part, the scenario is: set up the recording and then play for a couple hours and see what comes out of it.

Sometimes it's a disaster. You take the recording home and you realize everyone was playing in a different key or time signature. Sometimes you find that you've essentially played a genre piece - a song that's just a standard song in some genre that contributes nothing. Or you start hearing nothing except the mistakes you made (or it's a great song except that one really essential part where you totally flubbed it). But most of the time i'm amazed how well it works out.

If music (or any art) is an expression of feelings or ideas that can't be expressed properly through standard language, then improvised music is surely the best expression of those ideas because it's what you are feeling at that exact moment you are playing it. With anything else, at best it's a mishmosh of what you were feeling the when you first started, plus what you were feeling the next 10+ times you've sat down to work with it. At worst, it's a dilution of that feeling as you continue to attempt to express some fleeting idea a day, a week, a month later. That's when things start getting pretentious, as you start deliberately trying to infuse "meaning" into something. Then you have to rehearse something 10 times in order to play it well enough to record it. Some types of music (I think of baroque music, or progressive rock) can survive that kind of repetition, but others can't. There's a line in the popular song Bullet With Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins (i'm no fan of theirs at all, but it's a good song and a great line), where he's talking about his "rage" and he asks "but can you fake it for just one more show?" I don't know how bands can play the same songs over and over again at concert after concert and keep up any level of intensity. There are definitely advantages to pre-arranged music - no mistakes, the ability to revise your ideas, and the ability to reach beyond your current playing abilities. But there are also advantages to improvisational music in that the music is more honest and immediate. It's also the most collaborative - you can't really write a song with someone else without someone subjugating themselves, but you can jam with other musicians on a equal basis. (Though it definitely helps when they are talented and have no egos.)

There's a line in the movie 24 Hour Party People where they are knocking jazz and they say something like "The people playing jazz enjoy it much more than the people listening to it", and i know exactly what they are talking about. There's also a flip side, which is that if i make a mistake, i may think it is the most horrendous thing ever, whereas a listener might not even realize it was a mistake. Either way, it's very rewarding to get some friendly criticism and feedback. So i hope that you will have a listen to some of our stuff over at the Skelly Gang page and leave a few comments letting us know what you think.