Completed September 14, 2022
Premiered June 3, 2023 at Current Space by Danielle Williams (cond.), Mind on Fire, and recorded live by Jason Charney

Supported by New Music USA’s Creator Development Fund for 2022-23
Commissioned by Mind on Fire
Winner of a 2024 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award

Original text:

Movement I - The apparition of these faces in the crowd...

worn-down, faded bench 
companion to weary travelers 
catching their breath between stations
we sat together
laughing into each other’s shoulders
as we ducked beneath neon-singed clouds 
of rush hour smoke
rolling, tumbling down
old-town alleys turned glass walkways 
noodle bars turned Apple Stores

Taoist temples turned shopping malls 
teeming 
thrumming
into the night
our hands nearly touched 
amidst the rhythms of the crowd 
as indefinite and fleeting
as the skyline around us 
my train arrives
I rise to leave
looking back through tinted plastic, I wonder 
in this city of forgetting
will you remember me?

Movement II - ...petals on a wet, black bough.

when I returned
the bench was no longer there 
they turned it into 
a Starbucks
the largest in the world 
I went in
a ghost among the rows of emptied Gravitas blends 
silhouetted against the Roastery Bar’s harshly gilded tones 
floating up the escalator past smoky mocha updrafts 
and glimmering Tom Dixon fixtures
when through a tinted mezzanine glass panel -

I see us
          past coffee-stained mugs and soft curls of wispy steam 
     together, sitting
undisturbed by the surrounding rush 
of raindrops and unfilled orders
the moment suspended
     a gentle warmth about us
unconcerned, content
as we laugh, sip, and remember -
hazily I saw their outlines rise
the pair evaporating with the last of the moisture 
into the crowd, out the doors
as a gust of smog blew in 
and filled their void

they built a bigger Starbucks in Chicago.

Large Ensemble

Nanjing West Road, for soprano, mixed ensemble, and fixed media

Music Composer | Producer | Sound Designer | Engineer | ...
◦
jnsa (JIN-suh) [b. 2002] is defined by a fragmentation rooted in the absurd:

Composer interested in the combination of Electronic/ElectroAcoustic/Acoustic instruments.

Cinematic and Narrative music.


 
Contact I timotheemarceau@gmail.com

*:✧˖(ෆ˘͈ ᵕ˘͈)(˘͈ᵕ ˘͈ෆ)✧˖°:

When I have music in my life and when I create music, I feel grounded and real. I feel like there's something I can give, something I can do, something I can say and I feel the most utter and complete joy.

che ali is an experimental interdisciplinary artist based in new york city. che primarily performs and creates music as a violinist and composer while also integrating objects, voice, movement, and poetry. their practice often deals with themes of memory, place, the quotidian, exploring humaness through a somatic lens and in dialogue with poetic possibility and conceptual inquiry.

Nanjing West Road, for soprano, mixed ensemble, and fixed media

Bobby Ge