Sound & Light Installation
We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together, a kinetic sound and light installation that investigates the deconstruction/reconstruction of white noise and white light. White noise is what the human ear hears in the presence of all wavelengths of the audible spectrum. Technically, within a segment of white noise you have all the materials for every song ever written, and every song that will ever be written. Similarly, white light is what the human eye sees in the presence of all wavelengths of the visible spectrum. Like a prism divides white light into the complete visible color spectrum (rainbow), We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together aims to explore the idea of a sonic prism, where the ear becomes the location where different frequencies combine to create ‘white’.
String Orchestra Composition
Commissioned by Issue Project Room (NYC) for the String Orchestra of Brooklyn. Written in the cold, wet, darkness of a Swedish winter, Pillars of Light is inspired by an atmospheric optical phenomenon in which a vertical band of light appears to extend above and/or below a light source. The effect is created by the reflection of light through tiny ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere or clouds.
Sound and Light Performance
Based loosely on Ganzfeld experiments (a technique used in parapsychology in the 1970s as a way of invoking telepathy), Color Field Immersion involves masking the audience with semi-transparent blindfolds onto which light projections are mapped. Similar to sensory deprivation, Color Field Immersion provides perceptual deprivation, replacing the entirety of each audience member’s visual field with washes of color, line, and movement – often inducing hallucinations as the brain seeks to replace lost stimuli. Flipping the traditional performer-audience relationship, the internalized experience becomes the location of the performance. Combined with rich, textural soundscapes, Color Field Immersion creates a deeply immersive perceptual architecture of sound and vision.
Expanded Saxophone & Electronics
No score – this work is a product of digital sampling processes.
Scalextric is from a series of works exploring the idea of a “hyper-orchestra”: a process of examining traditional western orchestral instruments, but recorded, processed, and mixed in a way that would be impossible to accomplish with live players while still keeping the integrity of their acoustic timbre intact. I explore the sounds of acoustic instruments – electronically – close mic’ing them, exciting and emphasizing the full harmonic spectrum of their personality, and fracturing them through granular samplers. This allows me to create lush textures out of the layering of hundreds of instruments, create sounds and rhythms not physically possible on a traditional instrument, and spacialize elements of the sound in ways that physical performers in a room can not. Scalextric is named after a type of slot car racing sets which first appeared in the late 1950s and is inspired by the cyclical polyrhythms created by the racing cars looping along their miniature tracks.
Collected Video and Audio
Information about Workshops and Lectures