What are Breakdown sets?

The origin of the name is to be found in the early skiffle music. In between full evening Jazz concerts, little 'breakdown sets' where introduced, to keep the audience in the bars while the musicians were having a drink. The breakdown sets also allowed the musicians to rest their tired embouchures or introduce other songs to their audiences. Usually the drummer, double bass and guitar/ukelele continued with covers and new songs. For the reason of entertainment, sometimes weird self-built string and percussion instruments were introduced. As so often happens, the other thing became the thing, and skiffle was born!

More details can be found in Billy Bragg's book 'Roots, Radicals and Rockers - how skiffle changed the world'.

What are Breakdown Sessions?

The BreakdownSessions are a continuing series of connected performances between Gívan Belá and Geza Roman Bobb. Connected means online playing together over an icecast server, and pure data clients. In these home performances, the musicians are exploring new digital and analog instruments, new structures and ideas, interactions and combinations.

How to connect, what has been played and will be done (when)?

More information about all that is to follow here when we are not playing.

The latest Breakdown Session between Berlin and Hranice (Vysočina), just using jitsi.org which has the opus compression for audio with very little latency:

just a night in fall ogg format

just a night in fall wav format

Oh, maybe I will write something on Jacktrip and Quacktrip in due time...

Stay detuned!