Phil Hargreaves: I see improvised music as a chaotic system (as in chaos theory), which is to say it always starts from the same state, i.e., a finely-aware silence, but tiny differences in the initial stages move it in drastically different directions. So if I'm an 'initiator', and this could be in a live situation as much as a mail collaboration, then I'll usually start with an idea. "Do slap tongueing" for instance, or "play loud with gaps". But once someone else comes in, then the ball game shifts, and that decision has to be reviewed constantly in the light of whatever has been added to the stew, and the immediate future is, of course, conditioned by the immediate past. Sometimes I pass into a trance-like state while playing, where I exist only in the present moment, and I lose all awareness of self, but this doesn't always happen, and I don't know if it's necessary for good playing, as I can never remember what I was doing at the time. The pitfalls of memory... "...More >< Less