Over the summer I did a workshop with BOTCH Ensemble on Zoom. The whole setup seemed eerily familiar as we’ve always vocalized circuits, systems, and algorithms, though up until now it has been through low-tech live performance. This time we were actually online. I wrote an article about it for the Brooklyn Rail here.
oyster is a new opera that traces a little known corner in the musical history of Last.fm and Pandora. In the 1960s, renowned American folklorist Alan Lomax developed a wildly ambitious system called cantometrics for coding and analyzing folk songs from every corner of the world using an IBM360 mainframe computer. Using this data, I worked with the BOTCH vocal ensemble to synthesize world song styles, incorporating the results into an audiovisual software engine that unravels connections between cybernetics, surrealism and ethnography. I did an interview about oyster at Skidmore here.
some stills from oyster, a new opera and audiovisual installation sponsored by Harvestworks…
Here’s an excerpt from a piece created with BOTCH Ensemble over the summer at Watermill Center. It’s a gallery opera in response to Robert Wilson’s art collection, the first of a series of archive-specific performances we will be doing over the next few years. This performance features Christina Campanella, John Rose, and Saori Tsukada:
Over the last year I’ve been composing the score for a new dance / theater work by LEIMAY. It premieres at Brooklyn Academy of Music Feb 18 – 21, 2016. I had a fun time retuning and mangling my piano until it sounded like this: