MADE SPACES & ENCOUNTERS · SURFACING · APPLYING · ACTIVE
Surfacing: the sign-making that happens inside the codes you are working with, in real time, with no draft.
Applying: how a recording lets another person stand inside a moment they were not present for.
A self-taught piano practice of close to a decade, kept close to improvisation rather than to repertoire. What holds the attention is not the reproduction of a piece but the act of making one in real time: the way a phrase begins before its ending is known, the way the next gesture is conditioned by the one just played, the way an improvisation cannot be revised without becoming a different improvisation. The feeling of playing in a unique moment that cannot be returned to is semiotically rich in a way found nowhere else in the work: the sign and its making are simultaneous, with no opportunity to step outside the sign system and inspect it.
The recordings below are not performances of fixed compositions. They are traces of singular moments, semiotic events that existed in their making and now exist as their record.
A piano, attention, and a long-running interest in what happens when the maker has no draft to work from. Theoretical training came late and remains secondary; the music theory now being worked through more deliberately is not a replacement for the embodied competence built over the decade but a second language it can also speak. The practice intersects with a research interest in real-time meaning-making, the kind of semiosis that does not survive being stepped outside of, and with the broader question of how an encounter that is sonic, temporal, and unrepeatable can be designed for without being scripted.
A solo improvisation recorded in 2024, titled in reference to Sakartvelo, the Georgian endonym for Georgia.
Visual clips recorded around Tartu in August 2023, set to a solo improvisation titled Solari.
An improvisation responding to a long-lasting winter that stretched well past its season. Aprill is Estonian for April.
The piano practice sits alongside the research, not underneath it. Improvisation is the form of meaning-making where the de-signer’s stance is least optional: the maker is inside the sign system without recourse, navigating toward a quality (a phrase that resolves, a passage that lands) that cannot be specified in advance and cannot be reached except through the act itself. The recordings make the practice partially visible to people who were not in the room.
YouTube channel (full body of videos and music): youtube.com/@zick1010
Theoretical resonance: the thesis treats the living spaces inhabited as incubators for creative practices including piano improvisation; this entry is the practice itself, in its own register.
A self-taught improvisational practice · ~2016–present