He’ll be coming to Australia with his ‘One Album Per Hour’ tour, in which he’ll undertake the gargantuan task of completely improvising an entire album from scratch within the confines of a single performance. Foreman has been performing this tour for four years, taking quirky suggestions from the crowd and recording a fresh album of genre-rich anomalies with each and every gig. Working his magic on the best suggestions and shooting down the “shit” ones instantaneously, it’s a wild fusion of hilarity and awe-inspiring musical ability.
“It is a genuine pursuit of trying to make an album, but it’s funny trying to get there,” Foreman explains. “Sometimes the songs are funny, and have novelty aspect to them, or they’re kind of an awkward pastiche of two mutually opposing genres which you wouldn’t normally hear together, but more often than not, I’m actually trying to genuinely make music that you would want to hear again and again.”
It’s a seemingly impossible feat, and for years, it was – until his persistence resulted in the invention of the Beardytron 5000 MkII, a technological marvel of looping equipment.
“I first started performing with just a microphone, and what I loved about it was the immediacy of being able to improvise on the fly. Then I discovered looping,” Foreman reminisces. “As soon as I was beatboxing on stage, I thought, ‘I want to be able to expand this ability to improvise out, using whatever tech I can get my hands on’. Initially, I wanted to keep it simple, but fairly quickly my ideas outstripped what tech I had, so I started just buying technology. I was buying all these loopers and set units, and I quickly discovered that you can’t do what I wanted to do with hardware that wasn’t built to interact. I realised that I had to build an integrated distribution system which was designed to work in concert.”
Though several years of software design and compiling hardware truly deserves the title of genius, Foreman asserts that mechanical creativity and vision is but another necessary component to any musician’s arsenal of technique. There’s now a vast landscape of music technology available, and for anyone passionate enough about music engineering, the possibilities are incredible.
“Even if you’re just a guitarist, and you want to just play music in a band, more often than not you have to be a bit of a ‘Heath Robinson’ mad inventor just to patch together all the guitar pedals that you want,” Foreman says. “Every musician these days has to be a bit of a mad inventor. No one makes it quite the same way when there’s so much software and hardware out there to do it. It’s really exciting. It used to be that you were either a musician or DJ. Now, there’s everything in-between. It’s a huge grey area where there’s so many ways to work with making music. With what I’m doing, I’m kind of an outlier in one respect, in that I’ve taken a kind of extreme goal and I’ve worked towards it.”
Foreman’s versatility knows no bounds, and he’s known for his hilarious live shows that both satirise musical convention and relish it with utmost respect. Bring up the title “comedian”, though, and you’ll get a cautious outlook.
“There was a time where I was deliberately putting myself in situations where I was really uncomfortable,” Foreman remembers. “I did the Montreal Just For Laughs Festival almost as a stand-up, because I knew I had to – not because I wanted to – because I wanted the training. I’m doing the Edinburgh Fringe next week, and I’ll do guests spots among other stand-up comedians, but I really don’t see myself as a stand-up comedian. There’s nothing wrong with doing something that’s funny, and there’s nothing wrong with doing a spot where everything you do is funny, but the term comedian freaks me out because it tends to mean that everything you do has to be funny. I mean, look at Harpo Marx. He was a goof, and soon as he started to play his instrument, that was serious. I think there’s something to be said for being an ‘entertainer’, rather than a comic, strictly. I don’t think there needs to be that distinction.”
When he first began his incredible quest, Foreman found that the perfect way to prove himself to the non-believing was to impress beyond expectation.
“If you want to make a really well-rounded show, ever, in any sense, you need to tug on lots of different strings,” Foreman explains. “It’s like a Hollywood movie or something. It needs to make you laugh, cry; everything. It needs to draw you in. It needs to obey certain forms where people have a certain amount of attention span. You need to make sure that there’s jeopardy in there, that gets resolved. You need to make sure there’s reincorporation. If it’s improvised and you go towards the major, you have to obey improv game rules and you can’t back away from a challenge. You have to answer it.”
BY JACOB COLLIVER
