BLAKE: Well I don’t necessarily see the two things as at-odds. Improvisation can mean a lot of things. I think it’s all too often synonymous with jamming, which is something I generally have zero interest in. I love rules and direction. I fucking crave them in performance. Pieces I write actually give the musicians very specific tasks to perform, but will simultaneously grant them a massive degree of autonomy in how to achieve those tasks. “The Ersatz”, again, is a perfect example of this. The performer is asked to mimic fixed sounds, pre-recorded sounds. Not to use those sounds as inspiration for riffs or to develop them into sick jams or anything, but to just imitate them as they happen. To be purely reactive. Which is kind of a rigid, robotic idea. But the musicians are given this assignment with the proviso that there is no wrong way to do it, which is where the improvisation lies.

A similar concept can be found in “Skin Procession”, in which the violinists are playing along to a graphic score. The score demands at very specific moments that the performer change from one pitch to another, say from a lower pitch to a higher one, for example. Even though the moment and direction of the change are very much prescribed, the performer has complete freedom to decide what the pitches actually are, independent of the rest of the group. That way, even though the overall shape of the piece is more or less written in stone, the harmonies that fill that shape are very much improvised, and can change with each performance. I like that notion quite a bit. It gives the performing ensemble ownership over not just the quality of performance, but the actual content itself. All while allowing me to retain my bullshit ego.

FLON: I’ve noticed that a lot of your releases late last year and early this year are based on or influenced by the theme of comedy, or, at least, jokes, though Punchlines And Formalisms for piano is very different from “Safe Space“. How did you come to explore comedy as a theme, and can you talk about the construction of those two pieces.

BLAKE: Yeah, good question. The short answer is that I’m just kind of a jokester and absurdist, so I like to dump all of that into my work. The long answer is that comedy, or at least the promise of comedy is one of my favorite forms of misdirection in music. I first got a taste for it when I was teenager in Las Vegas. My friend and I would go to the strip to do street performances. We’d bring a shit ton of gear with us: drum equipment, amps, guitars, and we’d spend a really long time setting it all up while the passers-by would stop and wait in anticipation of a music performance. Then once we were all set up, we’d start reading poetry, or practice beatboxing, or tapdancing. Anything as long as it didn’t actually entail using any of the gear we brought and made people watch us set up. The people on the street would get all pissed and walk away. We thought it was hilarious.

I kind of still do that, to a certain degree. “Safe Space” is a good example. It entails turning on a looper, leaving it on, and just telling jokes into it as if nothing weird is going on. After a while, jokes I’ve already told start playing back, and then more jokes start playing back on top of them, and more and more until it’s just a noise wall constructed out of snippets of my voice. As the looped layers of jokes start to accumulate, I just pretend like I don’t notice and keep telling more jokes to feed into the looper. I always introduce the piece as if I’m doing a stand-up comedy set. Sometimes I’ll tell the audience I’m a nervous performer and I need to tell a few jokes to break the ice, or sometimes I’ll just flat-out say I’m doing a stand-up routine instead of my regular set. Even though I think the concept is funny, and I always try to find the best so-dumb-they’re-funny jokes to use in the set, the end result – the sonic result – of all those loops playing at once is the real point. It’s actually one of my harsher pieces, noise-wise, despite being packaged as a stand-up routine.