The “one-page piece”—a written-down musical composition that fits on a single piece of paper—is appealing
to a group like the Belgian/Dutch electric guitar quartet Zwerm. Zwerm and their collaborators took full
advantage of the opportunity to create their own scores out of the one-page pieces, to allow their own
creativity and compositional ideas to run free, to explore interesting sound worlds, and to seek out possible
links between the pieces. These positive experiences are inherent to the format of the one-page piece: a
composer provides a musical idea, in traditional notation, prose, graphics, or some combination of all three;
sometimes this idea is rough or conceptual, sometimes more clear in its musical content and process. The rest
is up to the musicians. Collaborative brainstorming is necessary, and many ideas might be tried out before
settling on a particular way of realizing the piece; often, the possibilities seem endless, limited only by one’s
conventional training, adherence to idiomatic instrumental techniques, and musical sensibilities. This
collaborative brainstorming works best when the ensemble is made up of adventurous musicians who trust
each other.

One-page pieces fall into the category of process pieces. With roots in the history of American
experimental music, both process pieces and one-page pieces are sometimes traced back to Terry Riley’s
minimalist masterpiece In C of 1964. The recordings on this CD represent a crossover project in which Zwerm
looks for connections between the sound worlds of blues, free improvisation, experimental rock, noise,
minimalism, and many other contemporary musical ideas.