Like all good collaborations, this one started with breakfast in Weatherspoons. Rosie and I studied together at Goldsmiths, where we used to make music together regularly. However we hadn’t seen each other in nearly a year, and hadn’t played together for several years. I was working in London for a few weeks and we had made vague plans to catch up, and had previously spoken about having a jam with double bass and hand pan (a steel drum type thing also know as a hang drum, that Rosie has acquired several of). After a while we found a time that worked for both of us, a late morning before i would go and play a theatre show, meaning I would have my double bass with me, and so a both a catch-up and a collaboration was possible, with minimal effort. And so we began with breakfast at the Brockley Barge before heading to Rosie’s living room to collaborate. 

Rosie had done many ‘pan jams’ before, with playing duo with hand pan and a whole range of other instruments. Most often these were with classical musicians and took a more structured ‘collaborative composition’ approach. At first she suggested an approach she had used previously as a starting point for collaborative composition, which was using a random word generator. We tried this for a while but for me it didn’t seem necessary. We then thought about making some more ‘composed’ grooves and picked one that we would then try to reach at some point. However, this particular clip is pretty much completely free, and too me sounds much more organic, musical and communicative than ones where we tried to do something preconceived. 

We spoke afterwards about how much we enjoyed the process, despite both being a bit uncertain beforehand as too wether it would actually be fun or not.