UNC Asheville club experiments with varying sounds, utilizing improvisation

UNC Asheville musicians experiment with musical improvisation in "Decomposition: New Solutions for Sound," a club founded early this year that meets every Friday.

"The experiences I've had playing music with local musicians and students inspired me to organize a place where people can group and exhaust their ideas, sounds and influences," said Sijal Nasralla, junior student and founder of Decomposition. "A typical meeting usually takes place in two parts: an informal improvisation session with an assortment of instruments and usually a chat about ideas and consequences," Nasralla said.

Nasralla plays bass in the drum-and-bass band No Shoulders, but Decomposition allows for further experimentation.

"I am dabbling every day in new instruments, recently the saxophone and styles, mostly electronic and pop," Nasralla said. "My comprehension of music limits me to playing a novice and misguided interpretation of jazz."

Decomposition offers a venue, Lipinsky Hall 018, where any kind of musician can turn up their amps and be as loud as they want in a soundproof area.

"I couldn't be loud while playing music in my dorm room in Governor's Village, and I felt that there were a lot of musicians with similar grievances," Nasralla said. "In the beginning, I pledged for an egalitarian and liberating creative environment."

According to sophomore student Zach Smith, the club's primary function is to exchange ideas among a variety of styles and musical backgrounds.

"(Decomposition) is a place where each individual can come and voice their ideas on what to do with new music," Smith said. "Members can use traditional instruments with new techniques. If it's acoustic, it's usually amplified, and percussionists tend to use scrapped metal."

At Decomposition's first meeting this fall, Smith plugged his laptop into a guitar amp to perform material written over the summer.

"Zach has been making interesting ambient music, mostly software-based, with mastery and intention," Nasralla said. "We have a few other really good individual performers. Everybody has their own idea and vision of the group."

Wray Bowling, a senior multimedia arts and sciences student, uses Decomposition as an outlet for his interest in multimedia arts.

"We used to have a sound design major, but it doesn't exist anymore," Bowling said. "It's a cool group, because weird things happen spatially with sound in the meeting room. I'm a big fan of the discussions, figuring out how to apply more than physics to conceptualize experimentation."

Bowling said that raw materials are popular in Decomposition, where members can bring in handmade instruments and appliances.

"Zach built his own contact microphone and brought it to us to show us how to make one and put it against different objects and instruments" Bowling said. "The music industry is always looking for new sound. The cheap 'duct tape' approach is sort of our collegiate version of finding that sound."

Nasralla said that although some performers are aggressive and noise-based, Decomposition is not meant to seem violent.

"At our first meeting, I mentioned to everyone that music is a force in itself, and I didn't really form this group primarily for catharsis or redirecting feelings of angst through noise," Nasralla said. "The music we make could be perceived as violent, but we didn't want to be that group with violent imagery, slowly baptizing our flaming guitars."

Several members of Decomposition played last month at Izzy's, a coffee shop on Lexington Ave., although it was not advertised as an official Decomposition event.

"We've only had four, maybe five public performances to date," Nasralla said. "Our first was at the end of the spring semester in the Highsmith Grotto. We were experimenting with chance operations, audience participation and how we could conduct a group of musicians in a somewhat orderly manner with an unpredictable chaotic process."

According to Nasralla, the Grotto performance was relatively complex, but it was well-received by the members as a success.

"We used chess to command the musicians," Nasralla said. "We split the performers in half and we gridded the chess board so that every performer knew, by location of specific color-coded pieces, when and how to play their instrument."

Other Decomposition performances include live radio broadcasts at UNCA's Blue Echo and solo performances at off-campus venues.

"Our radio performances were strange experiments in chance operations, language and tonal or thematic chemistry," Nasralla said. "Other performances, like the ones in off-campus clubs that our members play aren't related to Decomposition aside from the fact that the people playing the shows know each other through or are involved in Decomposition."

Decomposition is a culmination of multiple philosophies, according to Nasralla, but every member shares one basic outlook.

"The musician or artist is often times engaged in an overlooked dialectical with their environment," Nasralla said. "The space and overall surroundings are feasible resources, and they affect an individual's art just as dramatically as the instruments they use to create it."

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