Cutting Off Your Nose To Spite Your Face is a new piece of aleatoric music which seeks to meld through composed music and free improvisations, creating frameworks in which improvisers improvise, and generate new sound worlds upon every performance.

I have created a collection of flashcards and have planned specific cue cards and cue movements which signal to an ensemble of improvisers, how to improvise. They will improvise music within the confines of those cards. There are four categories of cards:
Dynamics Cards
Articulation Cards
Adjective Cards
and Effect Cards

Dynamics cards dictate the dynamics that performers will play

(example: piano crescendo forte, which can be interpreted either as starting quietly and getting louder until the end, OR, continually getting louder and quieter.)

Articulation cards dictate how to play; legato or staccato

Adjective cards are rather open ended cards, which simply read as single adjectives, which the performer must convey in their playing. (example: “Fuzzy” is a listed adjective card. The improviser should play in a “fuzzy” tone, whatever that may mean to them.)

Effect cards are cards which act as sound effects. I, the conductor of sorts, cue the players to play their effect cards throughout the piece as I see fit. I have the improvisers all stop playing when I cue an effect card. I cue them to play these effect cards by raising a fist and gesturing to the specific improviser I wish to hear. (example: if an improviser draws an effect card that reads “Play Highest Note”, I will cue them to play their highest note, and to have the rest of the ensemble stop playing.)

Devised via a system of cards and hand gestures, COYNTSYF's sheet music is far from conventional.

COYNTSYF is by one composer / improviser, and for everybody, musician or not, classically trained or learnt by ear, improvisor or rigid sheet music devotee, hippies and metalheads and classical snobs and jazzers, COYNTSYF is for everybody and anything. Any instrument, traditional or not, is a valid tool to perform this piece with.

Cutting Off Your Nose To Spite Your Face, composed by Logan Perry, copyright Ojo Music. All other tracks, improvised, copyright Ojo Music.

SAMI SONG (DEDICATED TO INDIGENOUS LAPLANDERS) is dedicated to the Sami people of Northern Europe.

Tracks 2 - 7 recorded at Rising Sun High School's Studio Green Room
Tracks 1, 8 - 11 recorded independently by LP

Special thank you to Jorge Ayala and Dan Vaughn.