portfolio

sound letters for wet ink (2021)

Sound Letters for Wet Ink is written with and for Erin Lesser on flute, Josh Modney on violin, and Mariel Roberts on cello. The trio first improvised with an initial eight 30-second audiovisual prompts, collages crafted from my sample library. Those improvisations were recorded and then combined in various ways to create dozens of new prompts. Over three weeks, the ensemble improvised with one another iteratively on these prompts, developing a recording database, samples from which this fixed media piece is formed. Although the performers never improvised at the same time, the synchronization effects achieved–as well as the gestural correlations–were remarkable. In particularly special moments, it seemed as though the person who had recorded the week before was responding in real time to the person improvising at that moment.

tower for greg stuart (2022)

with dried leaves, sticks, and stones, | build a tower as high as you can. | when it falls, begin again. | amplify everything.

Score

send_silence (2020)

is a collaborative work featuring almost a hundred ambient field recordings of silence(s) sent by friends from around the world. The piece might also be approached as an undisciplined, multi-site anti-performance of John Cage’s silent piece. Many of the explanations accompanying the recordings I received included thoughts on silence as an aspect of isolation during the pandemic. The collaged reassembly of these isolated recordings—all of which attempt but never attain the impossibility of silence—celebrates how even the most ordinary, ubiquitous sounds can inspire meaningful connections between us.

for laura (2021) & for emily (2020)

for laura (2021) presents eighteen alternating samples – (nine per large loudspeaker, around two-to-eight minutes each) –- cycling at random over the course of three days. The sound materials were developed from two seven-minute guided improvisations on A-string cello harmonics, performed by Laura Cetilia. I divided these two improvisations into eighteen separate samples and improvised with simple speed/pitched transpositions (0.125x, 0.25x, etc.) for each to form the materials you hear. The large Mackie loudspeakers, together with the stairwell’s height and surface reflectivity, supports the large frequency range, and especially the low frequencies that result from the improvised transpositions, at an unusually low volume.

(5 minute excerpt)

for emily (2020), devised a year before, with Emily Call on violin, was my first experiment with creating a drone developed from layered transpositions of minimal sonic materials.