This sonic landscape was mined from recordings of stone sculptor Jonathan Shor's working of a large piece of granite. I recorded him drilling, placing shims, tapping the shims, and the wonderful sound of millions of years of energy being released as the stones split. The PLOrk players manipulate these sounds via a ChucK program that allows them to change proporties of the sounds. Eventually, a rhythmic pattern emerges (the striking) wherein the individual PLOrk players control both texture and synchronization.

I unfolded
     your silver byobu.

"Mirror Dance" is an electronic piece originally composed for the dancers of Beijing Contemporary Dance Company, as a part of the LeFrench May Arts Festival "Jumping Frames" project. This revised performance is for laptop quintet.

An electro-acoustic, structured improvisation for 1 flute, 2 humans, 5 laptops, 5 MIDI drum pad controllers, and 30 audio channels.

(see PBS homepage)

This piece is an exploration of the disaster that ensues upon taking some perfectly good harmonies and ruining them with phase shifting and subtractive melody.

What is that supposed to mean, you ask?

We don't know either.

Originally created for the Ear to the Earth Festival, this piece is a PLOrkian rumination of crystal caves in the clouds, where the only sounds are those of the wind and the resonances of the crystals. It uses two simple instruments called the crystalis and wind-o-lin. These instruments make use of the laptop keyboard (which controls pitch and resonance) and the trackpad (which the players "bow" in various patterns to generate sound). See instrument instructions (pdf).

This piece is an experiment in extending the drummer's physical reach and sonic responsibilities. I'm particularly interested in constructing systems that require the performer to rewire the body, to make new aural connections to conventional performance techniques. Here is a self-imposed version of such a system. Thanks to Spencer Salazar for many extraordinarily patient coding hours and to Perry Cook for disaster-averting last-minute hacks.

The purpose of this piece is two-fold:

1. "Jam-pack" a lot of performance possibilities into a small number of interface components so that players have a large palette to work with, even without becoming experts on their instruments. The interfaces (Trigger Finger and Game Controller), and the way they are mapped to musical parameters, are aimed at creating a fun and playful experience for the players.

2. Maximize the likelihood that the resulting rhythms will be uneven and not too predictable, and minimize the potential for a regular rhythmic pattern to emerge.

A large group of percussion sounds can be played randomly or repeated, but players are limited in their choice of exact sounds, though they can choose from general groups, for example long gong and cymbal sounds or very short rattles and tablas. Players control rhythm, pitch bend, and volume. Trigger finger players may also filter their sounds. Game Controller players are able to launch a lot of sounds very rapidly. The piece can be realised with many different kinds of forms, with one or more players, and with varying degrees of group improvisation. More players and more improvisation can all too easily lead to chaos. We will attempt to stave off the chaos in our first performance by imposing some constraints in real-time.

Text: William Burroughs
Soprano: Sarah Paden
Alto: Anne Hege
Tenor: Tim Hambourger
Bass: John Graham

"I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune."

-Naked Lunch p. 7
William Burroughs

Three men. One room. No sleep.

A choir of simple (but glorious) singing synthesis models is controlled in real-time by players wielding joysticks and playing the laptop keyboard.