GRAPHIC SCORES AND ELECTRONIC WORKS
Well-Tempered
2023
ambient album
Well-Tempered is an album of ambient interpretations of the first two preludes and fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. Each of the four pieces was played using three different types of steel pans, and the recordings were then heavily processed through a number of methods including severe time stretching, reverb, delay, low pass filters, and glitchy gates and cuts. Recording is the second fugue in C minor.
Practice
2022
sound walk
Practice is a sound walk using field recordings I gathered of the practice rooms at the Frost School of Music. One day I was walking down the practice room hallway and had this cool experience of hearing music come in and out of earshot, disparate musical styles both mixing together and standing in contrast to one another. It was such an interesting experience, one that was unique to that hallway in that particular situation. I was inspired to create a similar sonic soundscape for anyone to be able to experience. After creating some stereo recordings of the hallway, moving back and forth in the hallway and eventually out into the open, I combined certain elements (some altered, some unaltered) to create the sound walk.
Pentagraph
2022
graphic score
Pentagraph is my first graphic score, conceived as a game to be played by any number of performers. I laid out the score like a board game, with different paths that could be followed that end in a unique figure to be interpreted by the performers. There are five different paths that can be followed in any order, as many times as the performers desire, so long as each path is followed at least once and the total number of paths followed is a multiple of five.
Recording by Ash Mach and Lee Cyphers.
Surface of the Water
2021
fixed media
Surface of the Water began as a simple exercise in improvisation and exploration of guitar effects, but I really enjoyed what I had created so I decided to turn it into an ambient soundscape using only electric guitar and bass, plus reverb and delay effects. I created both repetitive figures and ever-changing melodic ideas and combined them to create the piece. The work is featured on my minimalist ambient album Jungle.
Forge of the Heavens
2021
fixed media
Forge of the Heavens was my first foray into spectralism. I recorded the sound of my tenor steel pan's skirt being struck by a typical rubber steel pan mallet, then analyzed the frequencies using the audio analysis program SPEAR to identify salient frequencies. I then used this information to create a semi-improvisatory piece playing both the pan and the pan skirt, which was recorded and then drenched in reverb.