Rainer Wiens breathes his improvisation to life

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      Rehearsing with Rainer Wiens must be a lot like taking a course in qi gong: it's all about the breath.

      Perhaps surprisingly, the Montreal-based musician doesn't play a wind instrument. He's a guitarist, with a sideline in African thumb pianos like the kalimba, mbira, and likembe. But central to his sonic conception is that musicians need to be aware of how they breathe, so they don't let themselves get seduced into empty virtuosity.

      In other words, he's no shredder. But he is an extremely thoughtful musician, whose upcoming collaboration with Orkestra Futura—the renamed and revamped NOW Orchestra—is likely to reveal a number of new and stimulating ways of looking at the contested terrain that lies between free improvisation and composed music.

      One of the charts he's bringing is called “Breathe Into Time”, and that's appropriate, epitomizing as it does his interest in finding organic ways of creating sophisticated forms. The idea, Wiens explains, is that the members of the band play the written material at their own pace, synchronizing his scored phrases to their own internal rhythms.

      “It makes for wonderfully complex rhythmic relationships because no one's breath is exactly the same length,” he says, on the line from his home. “And people's breath changes. You get excited, and your rate of respiration changes. But the thing is that the length of your breath is always right, so there's no sense of ”˜Oh, man, I'm behind the beat with this guy.' It's more about everyone having a slightly different rhythm, and it works beautifully. Even if everybody's playing the same phrase, the pauses are just on the natural breathing cycle, and it's quite wonderful to hear.”

      Wiens adds that this meditative approach is a way of circumventing what he calls “the Judge”: the nagging voice in the back of the mind that eats away at a performer's confidence. “The worst enemy of an improviser is his own brain,” he contends.

      Consequently, as a composer and guest bandleader, his aim is to free himself and his fellow musicians from habit while ushering them into unfamiliar terrain. “My role, in a way, is to create structures or situations where people are inspired to improvise,” he says. “And also, they have to meet me halfway. I want them to bring what they do, but because of the structure or the situation or the process, the music will also go somewhere else. Both they and I have to be surprised. I guess that's what I'm after.”

      Rainer Wiens and Orkestra Futura play the Cultch on Friday (May 14).

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