Humming in the background of all life - and familiar and alien as breathing - is improvisation. Even the most regulated life has its perpetual micro-incidents of improvisation, periodically spiked by volcanic eruptions of haphazard behaviour that release pressure. Settled situations are continually disrupted by crisis both grave and petty; life, like improvised music, is a disturbing conflict between predictability and contingency. In this sense, composition may be the more utopian strategy, since one of it's intentions is to counter our fear of catastrophe with orderly outcomes.

Sit, do nothing; this is improvisation. Allow stray thoughts, inner tremors, sensory impressions to pass through the body. To listen is to improvise: sifting, filtering, prioritizing, placing, resisting, comparing, evaluating, rejecting and taking pleasure in sounds and absences of sounds; making immediate and predictive assessments of multilayered signals, both specific and amorphous; balancing these against the internal static of thought. From moment to moment, improvisation determines the outcomes of events, complex trajectories, the course of life. Humans must learn to improvise, to cope with random events, failure, chaos, disaster and accident in order to survive.

Yet as an antithesis to this improvisational necessity, we find an insidious culture of management strategy, militaristic thought, planning and structured goals expanding through all social institutions, a desperate grasping at political antidotes to global and economic instability. In this context, the central role of improvisation in human behaviour is consistently devalued.

A music that embodies the strange dream or nightmare of a life almost entirely improvised, a life that is given a setting in which to unfold, an instrument through which to articulate it's unfolding, a time of beginning and a time of ending. Companions exist to share in this experiment - skilful, responsible, committed  but also impossible individuals, if only because the dream of freedom is so implausible, it's practice so difficult, it's nature so slippery and it's reception within broader society so hostile and uncomprehending.