Wie die Zeit vergeht…
Since my earliest days of music making, I have been fascinated with how music allows us a window into different ways of experiencing the passage of time. Through music and attentive listening, single moments can stretch to eternities, and long stretches of time can pass in an instant. Exploring the ways this phenomenon manifests, the techniques and conditions that best allow it to occur, has guided many of the musical choices I have taken since.
This interest becomes manifest in three key areas: my explorations of tuning and spectralism; work with phonography (the art of recorded sound) in- and out-side the studio; and keen interest in spatialised/multi-channel sound recording and playback.
During my time as a doctoral student at UC San Diego (2011-2017), I was privileged to study with great musicians such as Anthony Burr, Charles Curtis, Miller Puckette, Tom Erbe, Aleck Karis, et al. I developed a love for the music of Lucier, Radigue, Feldman, Young, Cage, and others, but during this time I also (re)discovered the music of Romanian Spectralist Horatiu Radulescu. Through Radulescu’s concept of Sound Plasma (plasmatic sound), I found an approach that fused the materialism of the American experimental composers with the affective directness of 20th century European classical music, and his Capricorn’s Nostalgic Crickets for seven clarinets became the central focus of my doctoral dissertation (recordings from which have since been published by Mode Records on the disk Plasmatic Music vol. 1). Work with tuning and spectralism continued from that point onwards, and in 2019 I became a founding member of Berlin’s Harmonic Space Orchestra (the world’s largest ensemble dedicated to performing works of Just Intonation). Most recently, I have been hard at work developing a novel approach to sound synthesis based on ideas sketched out in Radulescu’s Sound Plasma, which I call Mass Plasma Synthesis. Taking a few of Radulescu’s key theoretical ideas as departure point, Mass Plasma Synthesis uses (tens of) thousands of near-just-intoned sine waves, often at sub audible frequencies or amplitudes, to create boiling masses of spectral sound.
As a phonographer, I am interested in all stages of the production pipeline for recorded sound taken both within and outside the studio. I work as the chief recording engineer for the UC San Diego school of music. This job entails being a record producer, making releases of faculty, guest, and advanced graduate student works to the very highest of standards; but it also requires me to work as an archivist to preserve the 60 year legacy of this highly influential music department. Beyond this, I have extensive experience as a location and studio engineer in Germany. The catalogue of works includes those composed by Catherine Lamb, Jakob Ullman, Saviet/Houston, Jules Reidy, Morton Feldman, Phil Niblock, and so many more.
My field recording practice began in the late 2000s, inspired by artists such as Phil Samartzis (with whom I studied at RMIT University), Hildegard Westerkamp, Toshiya Tsunoda, and more. I am less interested in field recording as an acoustic-ecology based practice, but rather view my recordings as affective and autobiographical. When listening back to my 18 year archive of material, I am transported back to different times and places. I feel the temperature shift and wind on my skin. I feel that much of who I am is woven into these recordings, sometimes encoded literally through the slight acoustic traces of my presence that remain, and sometimes simply through the function of memory. Through recording, I feel I am able to find a relationship to environment, to space, to place, and to points in time, from which I often otherwise feel disconnected. To mangle a beautiful turn of phrase by Joan Didion, I record to find out who I am, how I relate to my environment and my position in time. To understand what I am thinking, feeling, and what that might all mean.
And lastly, a more recent interest has been sparked by presenting work for acousmonium in France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland (on the original GRM acousmonium, and the custom-designed system at Archipel Geneva). Through this, I have come into a love of the French “phenomenological” approach towards multichannel audio. This is an approach that eschews rigid standards for space and speaker setup, which I feel erase the peculiarities of location that make music a living breathing entity within a sound space. Instead, emphasis is geared towards placing speakers and sound in ways that will activate, or harmonize with, the space in which it will be installed. To that end, I have begun experimenting with constructing and installing speakers myself. I am lucky to be able to dedicate a small amount of my time here at UC San Diego to this work, and knowledge gained will be integrated into the research outcomes of several faculty members in the near future.