In late November of 2020, as part of the SO Academy’s Sonic Composition and Design mentorship programme, The Centre for the Less Good Idea hosted an In Conversation event between founder of The Centre, William Kentridge, and bassist, composer and music producer, Shane Cooper.

Opening the evening is a brief introduction by Kentridge which takes the shape of an impromptu tape recording, with Cooper improvising on upright bass. The resultant conversation takes place while Cooper manually cuts and splices fragments of sound and performance before running a completed length of manipulated tape through a Nagra tape machine – one of the key devices he employed while leading the mentorship programme with the SO Academy.

Through this brief bit of experimentation with live performance and analogue technology, Cooper and Kentridge extract sound from the immediate environment, rearrange it on tape, and re-introduce it to the stage. Audiences witness the materiality and the performativity of sound as the doctored tape moves across the stage and through the tape machine, relaying its incidental composition.

Over the course of the conversation, the two artists reflect on the journey of collaborative, episodic composition and design that led to Happenstance, the multi-layered series of soundbooks that came out of the SO Academy. Kentridge and Cooper also discuss their respective modes of engagement with the fringes and margins of the sonic world in their works – evoking sensory atmosphere through rhythm, intensity, vibrations, pulsations, resonance and discordance.

Musings on the physicality of sound as material for thought and imagination, the process of embracing aleatoric sound in order to break out of certain habits and routines in the creative process and the incidental and generative method of composition that arises from the playful engagement with analogue technologies, are other points of discussion throughout the evening.

Closing off the In Conversation is a brief Q&A session which leads to discussions around the notion of fragmented sound, music as collage and the essence and origins of sonic performance.

– David Mann