sound
Rules For Pedestrians
By travelling on foot we embody a pulse. With our feet, our hands, our eyes - we sense in twos. Cars driving parallel slide to stretches of noise and obscure our dance. Architecture forms rhythm in stasis. In every body's heartbeat a groove.
i forgot to turn off the sprinkler
Water is applied to flora in a controlled manner. A common lawn device enacts an irrigation ritual of necessity and excess. Rainfall is conjured. The morphology of these sprinkler sounds, like the sprinkler itself, indulges us with a space to explore notions of the essential and the abundant, what it means to need and to need not exist.
BOBA
CROFFLE! (3'48")
CHEESE FOAM (2'30")
FISH~DUCK~HUMAN (4'08")
Orbs of cassava are suspended in a blend of the white liquid food of mammaliaforms, an extraction of Camellia sinensis leaves, and the sweet-tasting carbohydrates in plant tissue. But all I can think about is whether I will successfully puncture the plastic film of this drink I paid too much for.
ANASTOMOSING
Anastomosis is the connection of two normally divergent things. ‘Anastamosing’ is the first in a series of works that encourage the sensing of a changing climate by fostering sensorial, embodied knowledge-making. Hydrophonic recordings of the Nieuwe Maas river are manipulated to activate public listening and promote kinaesthetic urbanity.
GUT
for string duo (7'00") This work was part of my masters research into the use of speech sounds in my compositional practice. I was very much inspired by the embodied knowledge gained in transcribing and interpreting a baby crying, and sought to explore the many subtle musical elements - glissandi and vibrati, development of limited pitch material - that operate in this basic form of expression. Rather than sketch a piece that was strictly programmatic (that is, meant to resemble a baby’s cry as closely as possible) I also sought to incorporate more abstract elements.
LINGUA FRANCA
for tape (7'25") I imagined the soundscape of the origins of language as a primordial ooze of utterances. I wanted to play with this notion, detaching words from their syntactic meaning and utilising language/s as a universal library of physical gestures.
WE ARE TIME
for tape (6'00") Music unfolds in time. Rhythms divide the flow of time into the audible and inaudible, the long and the short, the stressed and the unstressed. “We Are Time” builds a soundscape detached from time’s arrow. I’ve used sounds recorded at Rotterdam Centraal as a space inextricably linked to time. The station is a space of waiting, scheduling. Trains are on time. People run out of time. In creating the materials for this work, I liberated the sounds in the field recording from the time- domain through phase vocoding. The new fabric of space and time woven by these sounds invites the listener to discover new ways of listening to their environment, re-imagine the acoustic ecologies of their life, explore the link between themselves and their environment with sound as a mediator. This piece was commissioned by EUC as part of their Universe in You radio program/sound walk, which aired on Radio Worm.
DIPHTHONG
for electric guitar (12'15") The term diphthong comes from the Greek diphthongos, meaning two sounds. In a diphthong, the speech apparatus (ex. tongue) moves during the sounding of the first vowel. I wanted to explore ways a sound can unfold in time, rather than appear and disappear as a single, static event.
AH!
for tape (7'21") The listener is encouraged to access and experience AH! where its materials were recorded (Albert Heijn) as an augmentation of the acoustic ecology of the supermarket. I explore sound as a conditioned stimulus, with certain sounds (such as the notification that an item is on "Bonus") eliciting an emotional response in the shopper that I can exploit and subvertThis piece was created as part of Josue Amador’s A Different Soundscape project out of sounds from an Albert Heijn in Rotterdam (processed in Max/MSP).
HAAAM
for tape (8'20") Inspired by the increasingly difficult task of distinguishing human voices from synthesised ones after a phone call with a customer service bot. I began to think if it even mattered, and what this meant for the imagined futures of society and of art. Sounds are designed to recreate the attack of a tongue, the depth of guttural speech sounds, the instability of sung notes all in an effort to explore the space between the natural and the unnatural.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON'T
for chamber orchestra (7'14") I was inspired to navigate my experiences with bipolar disorder, which I was diagnosed with more than a decade ago. After an upsetting interaction with my dentist where he asked if I’m out in the streets violently attacking the public when I don’t take the medication I wanted to explore the space between extremes, the notion of active disengagement, emotional activity and passivity.
MOST TREES DON'T SEE THE FOREST
for hybrid orchestra (11'00") The forest is an environment of dualities in flux, of stasis and activity. A space where individuality and co-existence, spontaneity and ritual are intertwined. In this composition tones are sounded like trees in a dialogue with themselves and each other. The hebrew proverb "most trees don’t see the forest" (more commonly translated to “see the forest for the trees”) was used to generate musical material and embody the irony in becoming so focused on an object you no longer see it.
LAG
for piano trio (3'15") The COVID-19 pandemic: social interactions are transplanted to videotelephonic interfaces. Our lives take place online, remotely and at a distance from each other. This composition speaks to the latency inherent in these platforms (zoom, etc.) as well as the disconnect propagated by the new normal. Marco Silva - Violin Jan Zygmunt - Cello S'yo Fang - Piano