Sounds like what the Flaming Lips did with one of their albums. Four CDs designed to be played simultaneously or in any combination from different places in a room, but the levels keep changing, the timing keeps slipping, so you create your own mixes on the fly. Tricky to set up, but a really revealing listening experience.
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Last December, I participated in an open, improvised electronic jam session, organized by a local electronic artists collective in a music venue in Grenoble, France. I found the format extremely interesting: instead of giving participants fixed individual time slots, the aim was to engage in collective improvisation. Each musician could bring one synth, and all sound went through a mixing desk operated by the organizers.
The rules and recommendations, introduced in a quick briefing in the beginning, were very helpful: out of the 15 participants (which did not know each other), only 4 could play at the same time, participants should aim for a balance between various elements (drums, pads, leads, fx), and everyone’s focus should be on communicating, complementing each other, and being willing to ‘let go’ of one’s own ideas… In addition, the organizers introduced a playful element with a ‘wheel of fortune’ to change the mood of a section (eg dark, uplifting, ambient,…) (which did not work very well in practice), and the possibility of modifying BPM (by rolling a dice).
The result was a lot of fun! We played nonstop in constantly changing configurations from 19:00 to 23:30. Some moments lacked coherence, of course, but others were really good, and things started to come together extremely well.
I wanted to share this here because I had never read about this format before and found it absolutely great…
Some impressions:
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that sounds like an amazing event, who brings the gear? like is there a rule what gear you bring? going to play unknown gear sounds like a real deep water territory 
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Each participant brought their own gear. Given the number of people that had signed up, the limitation was one piece of gear per person. We met 2 hours earlier to install everything and also to see who would contribute what to the overall sound in order to facilitate coordination during improvisation (eg I brought a case of drum modules and therefore mainly switched with others also doing rhytmic stuff).
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Yes, it was! I am already looking forward to the next edition!!
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Yes. This a format I use when jamming with friends and musicians but I often wish to have EMOM nights like this. That must have been a great experience. Thanks for sharing this @ccr! 
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Yeah, I have also done similar things for jamming with friends before, but what I liked in particular with this much larger event was (1) to hear my synths on a big and good sounding system, (2) to improvise with others that I did not know beforehand, (3) the ability to step in and out of playing over the course of the evening - we had quite some audience, but being able to hand over to someone else (and then have a beer and listen to the others playing) took away a lot of pressure…
Edit: @Tchu, I think it worked very well because the members of the organizing artists collective played an active role not just by mixing the FOH sound, but also by giving advice to participants, brokering changes, etc. In hindsight, I think the moderating role is critical for allowing people to move out of the self-centered perspective that characterizes a lot of electronic music making (as opposed to playing in a band, for example).
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The perfect night.
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What a great idea!
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But is it really improvising…
joke btw
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Here is some ‘half-improv’ techno while trying to learn how to live record into Ableton. A few prepared sequences, basic sounds dialled in, then hit record and went with it without planning any sort of arrangement. Just wanted to see what would happen, and to see what the weaknesses were with the template I’ve set up for jamming and recording with hardware.
Lots of lessons learned in the process, which was the point of it, so far from perfect, but it has a vibe.
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It’s crucial if you want to make something good. For an Electronic Music composer, it’s hard to stop layering sounds when you’re used to do every little sounds in a Track. This kind of event must be good for humbleness and it forces you to have an open mind and to listen to others. This improvisation night was well planned it seems.
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What did you find out? Was setting Ableton up for recording up here too today - finally figured out how to record with Ableton clocked by Hapax, and lag/latency from audio interface solved. (Ableton Noob).
Did you see this episode? Maybe pretty standard way of working for others here - but to me it finally showed how live jamming and Ableton can work together nicely and seem fun:
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No, not seen that, will watch it this evening, thanks!
The main takeaway is that grouping all the tracks and adding a utility to the group to add a flat amount of gain across the board, counteracting the overbridge volume drop, is not sufficient. I need a utility on every track with the same amount added, but with the ability to quickly turn it down a touch on the fly to counteract any errors. I’ve got a Launch Control XL arriving tomorrow to let me easily do my sends and panning, and I’m pretty sure I can set it up to control the gain on the default setup if I understand it correctly.
I also realised that my Circuit Tracks is not getting any transport or clock, which meant that when I leant in set up a second kick track, nothing happened haha.
So lots of work to do. And I need to watch a 100 hours of videos on the settings of the stock plugins.
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In the recent chat he did with the performers, I think he said he does not curate or create a mix, rather he keeps the channel faders up for all of them. Maybe I misunderstood?
Edit: found it, at 6:00 he explains it. http://www.youtube.com/live/C5x3htRtkoQ?si=_x5lEGogI3spEMW8
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I think he mentioned both for SHS and the STOOR live shows that he mostly intervenes when things gets too stale, or sometimes he cuts someone’s lows or controls volume to create space for others etc., he’s also creating the transitions (only with a delay iirc) which kinda acts like cues for the participants to shake things, so he’s not quite a conductor as in telling them what to play but he’s controlling the flow over time and the general mix
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Depends on which session he was talking about. If you watch the Knob Twiddlers podcast chat that was posted up thread a little while ago for the session that he did for the end of series one of the stay at home thing, he definitely was being the master controller.
Looks like the guy is having fun…
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This is it 
!