Unfinished Togetherness by ImprovONsemble

ImprovONsemble
drums, bass, electronics, computers, acoustic instruments, DIY devices, found sound, and networked audio systems

This release documents a moment when making music together meant not being together at all.

Recorded in March 2020, at the very beginning of the Covid-19 lockdowns, this ImprovONsemble session took place entirely online, as a distributed performance across multiple locations. Separated by distance, screens, domestic spaces, unstable connections and time lag, the musicians did not attempt to reproduce the conditions of a concert. Instead, they accepted fragmentation, latency and uncertainty as compositional material.

ImprovONsemble operates as a collective laboratory rather than a fixed ensemble. It emerges from ONsemble and from a longer history of experimental orchestral practices developed within Apo33, where authorship is displaced in favour of shared processes. In this session, that logic is taken to its extreme: participants join and leave freely, without hierarchy, without stylistic obligation, and without emphasis on individual identity.
Names are absent by design. What matters is presence, listening, and the willingness to engage with what is already happening.

The network itself becomes the score.
Dropouts, overlaps, silences, delays and glitches are not corrected or hidden; they shape the music from within. Improvisation here is not about expression or virtuosity, but about negotiation under constraint—a continuous adjustment to others, to the system, and to the impossibility of full synchronisation.

Released by scatterArchive in 2026, this recording is not presented as a document of crisis, nor as a nostalgic artefact of the pandemic era. Rather, it stands as an exploration of collective listening in conditions of distance, precarity and partial connection—conditions that have since become structural rather than exceptional.

Mastered at Bruit Brut Studio, the sound retains its raw, distributed character. There is no attempt to smooth out the fractures. What remains audible is a fragile, temporary architecture of sound, held together only by attention and care.

This is not finished work.
It is an activation.

A record of what happens when the desire to play together persists, even when togetherness itself is unstable.

since 1994

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