David Toop, Peter Cusack, Steve Beresford, Terry Day

Featuring: Alterations

Alterations were one of the great anomalies of British free improvisation: a quartet of David Toop, Peter Cusack, Steve Beresford and Terry Day, active from the late 1970s, who played not from scores but from instinct, surrounded on stage by hundreds of instruments of every size, origin and colour, many of them non-Western, spread right across the floor. This LP gathers never-before-released live recordings from a session at the Logos Foundation in Gent, Belgium, in January 1981. The group's method was pure cooperative improvisation: listening, reacting, throwing in ideas, with the music itself responding to the room, its acoustics, the background noise and the audience (with whom, on occasion, actual conversations would break out). That huge range of instruments yields an equally huge sound spectrum, from sudden bangs to barely-there low notes, from squeaks to plain guitar. Playful and rigorous in the same breath, it is a vivid document of a singular group caught in the act. Part of Sub Rosa's SubLogos series. LP.

 "The music is free-improvisation -- that is we make our music co-operatively while playing: by listening, reacting, throwing in new ideas, not by following preplanned schemes. At its simplest the group's intention can be said to be to play together as well as possible and to enjoy ourselves while doing so. We are very interested in the result and intend that the audience is as well. As well as the musicians reacting to each other the music itself is pretty reactive to context. In other words, room acoustics, background noise, audience response have a strong effect on what happens. This is particularly true of the audience. We have done performances where conversation has broken out with some audience members. There is much to see as well as hear -- this is partly to do with the instruments. Together Terry, Steve and David have hundreds, all sizes, all sorts, most colors. They completely cover the floor. Many of these are non-western. The wide range of instruments means that an extremely broad sound spectrum is covered, from sudden bangs to very quiet low notes, from squeaks to normal guitar sounds. This is what fixes the overall group sound." 

Logos Foundation: Belgium Flanders' unique professional organization for the promotion of new music and audio-related arts by means of new music production, concerts, performances, composition, technological research and other activities related to contemporary music. This organization has been founded in 1968 by Godfried-Willem Raes.