Composition
Default Person (2025) - excerpts
Source audio is collected from the Shorts feed of a blank, newly-created YouTube account, with location tracking disabled. By giving the algorithm so little information we present it with a "Default Person". The feed's view of this non-being is the closest thing to its sense of "humanity" or "the people".
This found-sound input passes through a network of tape, loopers, guitar pedals, and feedback processing, accompanied by live input from a drum machine and keyboard. The performer acts in good faith, complementing and answering the feed. Meanwhile, the machine works to engage and overwhelm - to find out who is watching and what will keep them there. Like a scorpion sealed in a glass bottle, it stings and stings, but enough layers of indirection are present for us to avoid slackjawed addiction and listen openly to the sounds as sounds.
Thy Comma Relaxant (2024)
A piece for percussion ensemble with a special notation based on relaxation, a novel rhythmic technique analogous to the tempering of a pitch interval.
The mathematics of harmony is the mathematics of integer ratios. Polyrhythmic textures are also described by integer ratios: therefore we can transform harmonic information into polyrhythmic information. This is the well-known pitch-rhythm correspondence of Babbitt, Xenakis and others. However, temperament - the retuning process which creates key structural features like "three major thirds add to an octave" - has until now had no rhythmic analog, preventing the emergence of a full "rhythm tonality" to rival the "pitch tonality".
The piece is structured around a series of commas - small pitch intervals which describe discrepancies among the pure intervals. Using relaxation, it is possible to realise these commas as polyrhythmic ratios, before tempering them into simpler relationships. This creates a palette of never-before-realised metric modulations and points toward new, explicitly tonal roles for rhythm as a structuring element.
A Damp Fresh Dreaming (2024)
A quiet and cathartic piece for large ensemble. It's named for a beautiful, almost hallucinatory walk I took at 5 AM after working late. I was very tired, and my surroundings seemed to blur until I was inside one big thing, not among many small things. Such moments are precious.
The piece is conceived as a single, continuously evolving sound, shimmering between familiar 12-tone intervals, microtonal friction, glissandi, and unpitched textures. It uses a modified major scale with the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 7th degrees raised a quarter tone - first in E, then in C quarter-flat.
Deciding (2023)
Deciding is an improvisation piece about power and consensus, written in response to John Zorn's Cobra. It takes the relationships among performers as its core material - they act generously or transactionally, violently or kindly, in response to a changing environment whose development is controlled by an otherwise passive prompter. Leaders and hierarchies might emerge or be rejected, and the outcome might be hopeful or chilling.
A construction of funnels, tubing and water tanks is placed on a board in view of musicians and audience. Each funnel is marked with an oblique and faintly absurd name - BROUHAHA, ZEAL, WOOZE, etc. The level of water in each funnel represents the intensity of a musical parameter. The prompter fills or empties funnels throughout the piece and the musicians improvise accordingly.
The parameters are carefully chosen to present decision-making problems. They represent global features of the music which cannot be realised by individuals, only by consensus within the group. Questions about domination, charisma and control arise quickly, but the possibility of a utopian outcome is there too.