Natural Artefacts - Electronic Serial Jazz Natural Artefacts is an improvisation group that explores and develops new avenues in jazz. The group has been around since the millennium, whereas the present formation has existed since 2018. The group consists of Merje Kägu, guitar, Anton Jonsson, drums, Susanna Lindborg, keyboard, and Per Anders Nilsson, live electronics. A major tenet in the group’s music is to explore man – machine interaction in a contemporary jazz context. A basic idea is to build a repertoire that might be described as modular. With this I mean that the composition work, at design time, is made with an intention that anything can be combined with anything. It might be melodies, rhythmic cells, bass lines, chord changes, scales, as well as more open instructions intended for improvisation. One major challenge for me as co-leader and material provider is to compose ambiguous music, which means music that at each instant is open for what to come next, the continuation. Major musical influences are the so-called serial music and open form practices a procedures, which emerged and possibly peaked artistically in the avant-garde movement of the 50s. This way of music making still offers many artistic possibilities, particularly in improvised music, which is different from the practices in the 50s. In our rendering, it is simply a way of organizing and performing pre-composed material in an open and indeterministic way. As an example: the group are performing a composition by Nilsson, that uses the 12-tone tone-row from Anton Webern’s Opus 30. One may say deterministic in content, and indeterministic in form and performance, to paraphrase John Cage. At the center of Natural Artefact is a machine, a sequencer / synthesizer / sampler, that mostly play the role of the bass. This is a very conscious choice, an experiment to try to get away from the common jazz rhythm section. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard, to paraphrase Pres. Kennedy. An experienced jazz rhythm section makes the life easy for a jazz musician, since they serve the group with a rhythmic and tonal foundation, at best it is kind of surfing for a soloist. The drawback is that there are so many clichés in jazz, that from time to time is impossible to get loose from, especially with a traditional rhythm section. In this group however, the challenge for me as composer and designer, is to construct electronically generated bass lines, that gives a similar foundation as a bass player does, with which the drummer can interact, and at the same time creating something that is strange and familiar at the same time. This situation forces the band to play differently, since my machines do not respond and behave normally, rather as if a jazz bass player.