Six years in the making, Micromotives represents a dynamic and empowering vision of real-time collective composition, created by composer Moss Freed and showcased by large ensemble Union Division. With improvisation and sociality at its core, this is dazzling and surprising music that shifts nimbly between materials and structural events, encouraging synchronicity and collaboration while giving unusually high levels of creative control to individual performers.

The aim of the project was to engineer an large-scale environment that both maintained the personal freedoms, sense of ‘nowness’ and modes of communication that improvisers commonly experience in small groups; and produced distinct and distinguishable compositions that were audibly impossible to achieve through improvisation alone.
Freed established Union Division early in 2018 to workshop these ideas, bringing together some of the UK’s top improvisers from a range of backgrounds. Through a shared language of hand signals, the collective practice that evolved enables large numbers of players to self-organise easily and transfer detailed information between themselves directly and inaudibly. There is no demarcated leader and any attempts to coordinate the group are invitations only. Each piece within Micromotives has a unique set of compositional materials that guide players towards particular activities and soundworlds but, critically, there is no obligation for performers to use these: improvisation is always the default position. Players, then, have power to determine their roles and integrate improvisation with predetermined elements fluidly, as they see fit, from moment to moment.