I have been doing a lot of solo improvisation at home lately. Just by myself in my room – a luxury I haven’t had since last summer. And this time, it comes with the strangeness of my new freedom. I have been out of school before but this time, I have a degree. I am working towards applying for grad school, but I also realize I don’t have to. I should if I want a better “job” to pay off the debt I will be in until I hit retirement age – but I don’t have to. I feel like I’m free-floating. At any rate, I have been pumping out solo improvisations that use some of the new extended techniques I’ve learned as well as some I’ve know for a while. I dive into the new stuff just to see what will happen; I experiment with familiar material to see where I can take it. This is the first recording I have uploaded so far. I began this improvisation with a long held note using an unconventional fingering. I often use this technique to get me started: hold a tone and wait until I hear something before I play it. The results are always surprising. In this recording, what begins as hollow tones and delicate multiphonics becomes a wild exploration of a quote from a Robert Dick piece I learned a few years ago. This quote takes me in a totally different direction than either the improvisation or Robert’s piece did, leaving me with a piece that sounds like a circus gone haywire. There will be more of this coming soon since I will be making a project out of recording my improvisations and documenting my process and the results. I hope you enjoy this recording and the material to come.