The way I work has not really changed in thirty years. The formats have. The instruments have. The clients have. The thing underneath has not. It all comes from the same place, which is the physical act of playing. Sitting at a piano. Musicality. Performance. The intuitive back and forth between a person and an instrument.
Unstable Systems is what I call it. The work is made live, in one pass, in the moment. Nothing is decided in advance and nothing is fixed afterward. What landed, landed. There are no rules to it, or rather there is only one, which is that you cannot impose rules on it. It has to be what it is.
An instrument has its own physical logic. You do not fully control it. You set something in motion, it does something, and you respond. That exchange is the same whether you are running a complex modular patch or blowing into a bone with a hole in it. What it needs is simple. Something physical. Your own body. Your attention on the gap between the two. Everything I find interesting in music lives in that gap.
The Gap
I have spent years getting into that gap, working with improvising ensembles, bands and improvised theatre in different forms. A lot of that work is about playing an instrument in a way it has never been played before. You deliberately break down the muscle memory and the trained control. You get under the technique to the instinctive response, the untrained one. That is usually where the interesting music is. It is also where my writing comes from. My approach to composition is the refinement and iteration of improvisation. I am not sure there is another way to do it.
It goes deeper than it first looks. Music reaches every layer of us at once. The old survival wiring, the reward centres, the fight or flight response, up through to the prefrontal cortex and everything we stack on top. A single sound can touch all of it. That is not a metaphor. It is closer to a cross-section of how we were built.
I make music the other way too, all the time. Slow, deliberate work in the box. Editing, layering, composition, production. It is valid and it is necessary for a lot of what I do. But the work that interests me most does not come from there. It comes from the moment something is fresh and is allowed to stay as it is.
The Thing Does Not Have to Be Perfect
Years ago I came across a documentary score that has stuck with me. The director, someone whose work I respect, used a recording of a person demonstrating the preset sounds on a synthesiser. It was clunky. Whoever played it was not making music. They were showing what the machine could do. But it had an edge and a directness to it, and a serious filmmaker heard that and used it, over anything sculpted and balanced to within an inch of its life. It has sat in the back of my mind ever since. The thing does not have to be perfect.
The point is the edge. You set up a system that is partly stable and partly not, and you play it right at the point where it might fall apart. That edge is where the charge is. It triggers the same response as real danger, the hormonal and physiological rush, without any actual danger. You get the buzz and the body reaction and none of the risk. That is why it lands the way it does. It is visceral, and it connects everything up at once.
When I am in it, a piece tends to run thirty or forty minutes. I am not composing. I am working the system. Responding to what wants to change, moving things, making things, letting one decision lead to the next. I cannot really hear it from outside while it is happening. It is a meditative state. It is deeply therapeutic to be in, and I hope some of that reaches the room.
Listening Back
The honest test comes later, when I listen back. That is closer to what an audience hears. I no longer know what was going on under my hands. I only hear what it is. My first instinct is always to fix it. Cut the part that drifts, smooth the join, lose the section that feels long. But I was not in a position to judge any of that while I was playing, and most of the time the instinct is wrong. There is space in the recording because I was working the system and could not overthink each move. Everything had to slow down and find its own room. When I listen back, it sits right. Now and then something genuinely runs too long and I deal with it. Mostly it works, and it holds my attention in a way a built-up, layered version never quite does.
A finished, produced record is a closed loop. Everything resolved, summarised, sealed, and called done. This is the opposite of that. It is an open loop. It stays expansive and unresolved, still moving. Nothing in it has been decided into place.
So the only decision I allow myself is where a piece starts and where it ends. I do not touch the inside. If there is an obvious technical fault, a dropout or a spike, I might lift it out. Otherwise what you hear is what happened.
Orbital Fifths
The first release is Orbital Fifths. Roughly forty minutes, played in one pass a couple of weeks ago. For now it is exclusive to the listening room on my own site, and the only way to hear it is to go there. That is deliberate. It keeps the work where it belongs, and it makes listening a decision rather than a background. It is fresh and unworked, and there is a lot of detail in it that you will only feel on good speakers or headphones.
It is at gileslamb.com/releases/orbital-fifths. More will follow over the coming weeks. Listen with good headphones or speakers, and an open mind.