The peculiar beauty of a song caught between composition and improvisation

The Musical Tracing Ensemble is an experimental performance project in which a group of musicians listen to a song together, but with each person hearing only an isolated track of the instrument they play. They then attempt to replicate the sounds they’re hearing as best they can on their own instrument in realtime, and the audience hears only these secondhand, improvised impressions (or ‘traces’) of the original song. Here, accompanied by a dreamy, hand-painted animation from the US artist Allison Schulnik, the effect is oddly engaging, as the skills of the performers collide with their naivety of the music, creating something that sounds halfway between a melodic professional performance and an avant-garde experiment.