The first time we embarked on a Musical Exquisite Corpse journey — alongside a handful of members of the Soundfly subscriber community — things got a little weird.
An “Exquisite Corpse” — or cadavre exquis in French — is a collaborative game whereby each contributor can only see a tiny fraction of the whole. It’s commonly done with drawings, where someone draws a head, folds the paper over so only the neck is showing, and passes it on to someone else to draw the body, without any idea what the head looks like. You end up with these absurd chimeras, amalgamated, fantastical creatures from beyond the imagination. We did it with music.
We invited musicians in our community to create two separate collaborative tracks together in which each musician was invited to contribute a part, while only being able to hear four bars from the contributor before them in line. It’s absurd and wonderful, and somehow it always seems to come together!
But this time around, and just in time for the spookiest month of the year, things got even weirder.
Round 2 of the Musical Exquisite Corpse Project started with two piano samples — a jazzy impressionistic improvisation by Elijah Fox and a sampled digital instrument built from granular segments of a piano recording by Ryan Lott — both culled from each respective artists’ courses on Soundfly.
From there, community members broke into teams to tackle the projects in the same blind sequential collaboration model without any knowledge of what the others were doing beyond the contributor before them.
Listen to both of the full tracks right here via Soundcloud.
Thanks to all the contributors:
TEAM ELIJAH FOX participants: Jens Sjöberg, Allie Alvarado, Grant Kandia, Jasmine Fellows, Marco Pepe, Addison Rich, Eva Grill, Geoff Nelson, Ramon Berguer, Katie Semro, & James Cawlfield.
TEAM RYAN LOTT participants: Fectoper, Alexis Martin, Steve Chabinsky, Cormac Doherty, Mike Hickey, Sam Amos, & Jeremy Young.
Between fun projects like the Musical Exquisite Corpse Project, exclusive perks and discounts from partners, access to community workshops and live artist Q&As, and unlimited access to Soundfly’s full suite of online music courses, make sure you never miss a beat, subscribe to Soundfly today.
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Continue your learning adventure on Soundfly with modern, creative courses on songwriting, mixing, production, composing, synths, beats, and more by artists like Kiefer, Kimbra, Com Truise, Jlin, Ryan Lott, RJD2, and our newly launched Elijah Fox: Impressionist Piano & Production.
