Works for fixed media follow one of the earliest styles of electronic music, Musique concrète, which uses recorded sound with no visual reference as raw material for imaginative musical expression. They used to be called “Tape Pieces” because of cutting, manipulating, and pasting magnetic tape into novel, joyful, and sometimes horrific sound collages.
Avian Chimæras (2015)
Avian Chimæras explores an enchanted forest of mechanical birds and other strange creatures. I was inspired by the Mocking bird's amazing ability to imitate other bird song and the Superb Lyrebird's gift at reproducing a remarkable variety of sounds; I thought it would be fascinating to imitate birdsong myself through the use of processes where mechanical and instrumental sounds could be aggregated in sophisticated ways to produce bird song. The natural syntax, vocabularies, patterns, and rhythms latent in birdsong gave me quite a rich palate to explore extra-musical qualities.
Solar Flare (2010)
This work is comprised of a single sample of my electric stove-top coil heating up and then cooling back down which is then used to drive spectral impulse responses of a kalimba and a temple gong. The harmonic reconstruction of the kalimba and temple gong evolves in complexity, pitch range, and density over the duration of the piece. To me, the work operates on several levels: aleatoric, surreal, and spectral.
Adjudicated Selection: SEAMUS Electroacoustic Miniatures 2010 Album
Persistence of Memory :: 2013
This work took one year to make, the longest I've spent with a single piece. It exists in a beautiful gray area between a 'hyper-real' ensemble performance and a surreal 'acousmatic' abstraction of these instruments. To me, it’s powerful, beautiful, and striking. It was a back and fourth collaborative process between Mark Hetzler (Trombone), Vincent Fuh (Piano), Nick Moran (Bass), and Todd Hammes (Percussion) performing traditionally notated material I composed, recording that, bringing the recordings to my desk for electroacoustic processing and re-composition in the studio, then sending these processed compositions back out to them to play over top of, sometime with notated music, sometimes improvised.
Steel Golem (2011)
- n (in Jewish legend) an artificially created human being brought to life by supernatural means [from Yiddish goylem, formless thing]
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition.
International Competition World-Finalist: Sound In Space Competition. Harvard University + Goethe Institut, Boston, 2012
Adjudicated Selection: Music of SEAMUS 2011 Album
Jorneta Stream (2023)
Program note intentionally un-written