Field recording made for "Palimpsest" during a residency with Spencer Agoston at HiSAM (Hawaii State Art Museum). 

Noticing a pronounced 60Hz hum emanating from several of the pieces in the HiSAM sculpture garden, I touched a contact microphone to the support pillars of Carol Bennett's "Trigger Picasso Energy" (2011). Not only does the work resonate richly from the facility's nearby HVAC, it also appears to pick up radio transmissions (perhaps due to the photovoltaic cells embedded in the work)!

I really don't have a clear answer, but the sound is magical, ghostly and mysterious.

Accidental Radio Sculpture

Created in 2022 for Cities and Memory (Obsolete Sounds project) and utilizing an anonymously donated field recording (Dedinky, Slovakia: Drunk shepherd sings to his sheep), this piece pairs sounds of a specific site with excerpts of an audio interview with my dear friend who was born in Slovakia in 1968. When she was very young, her family had dramatically escaped from the now-defunct nation of Czechoslovakia to the USA. Knowing this, I told her a little about the current project, hoping to hear a bit more of her story. It turned out to be a fortuitous pairing! The eponymous sheep bell comes from her interview, providing formal structure for the composition. The full recording of the shepherd in Dedinky is played through once, EQ’d to sound thin and distant. Played a second time less attenuated, the original recording sounds fuller but is shortened by several cuts. My approach to the placement of the interview vocals differs in the first and second sections as well. To begin with, the voice is interspersed in turn with the shepherd’s song. But as the story becomes lighter and more playful, my friend’s voice overlaps more closely with the shepherd’s. In these ways, I aimed to reflect my friend’s changing relationship with Slovakia, which she reflects upon so eloquently in her storytelling. I am grateful that the process of working with this recording could lead to such personal depths – in terms of both my friendship with the speaker and my understanding of what it means for something to become obsolete. How both objects and sounds can become steeped with memories that shift subtly with our changing perspectives through time. 

More information about the project can be found at http://citiesandmemory.com/obsolete-sounds/

One Single Sheep Bell

Composed in Utah for Erik Ehn’s One Hundred Thousand Praises project, premiering on Leap Day (February 29) 2024 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York, NY.

Recorded in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Ghent; Niigata, Japan; Lakeview, Montana & Salt Lake City, Utah (spring – fall 2023)


Score available at https://www.anemoneanomaly.org/one-hundred-k-days-x-seconds-2024.html

Epigraph: “I put this moment here. I put this moment here. I put this moment over here.… Holding all the love that waits for you here…. Come over here to where when lingers, waiting in this empty world… for now does ride in on the curl of the wave.” – Kate Bush, “Jig of Life” (1985)

One hundred k [days] x [seconds]

the sounds of drawing
both hands
eyes closed

10:37am Honolulu, Hawai'i

2018 - 12 - 20

composed in 2015
with voice and Roland SP-404 
for Daniel Bear's dance piece (with Caro Novella) in Santa Cruz
vimeo.com/147910644

words from Karen Barad (2012)
"On Touching: The Inhuman That I Therefore Am" 
published in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

touching barad

the sounds of drawing
both hands
eyes closed

10:59am Honolulu, Hawai'i

2019 - 04 - 11

the sounds of drawing
both hands
eyes closed

10:49am Honolulu, Hawai'i

2019 - 04 - 20

the sounds of drawing
both hands
eyes closed

9:30pm Honolulu, Hawai'i

2019 - 05 - 10

"Stein Phase" makes extreme demands on the performer's ability to concentrate, listen and speak without thought or hesitation. The performer's ability to move effectively through language is controlled and constrained by the sound of Stein reading her own poem nearly 90 years ago. Stein's recorded voice, transported through time and space, both speaks with and guides the performer. Stein's words go through phases of text/speech/recording, to be finally reconstituted into another's body, another's voice.

This piece is based on Stein's 1934-35 recording "If I Told Him : A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” a poem she wrote in 1923. Gratitude to PennSound for their invaluable archive of recorded poetry http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Stein.php

Stein Phased was written in 2006 and performed at Boise Experimental Music Festival (2007) as well as Boise's Veritas Bookstore and Contingency: Reading Between the Genres at Mills College Museum, Oakland, California (2009).

Stein Phase: Instructions for a Performance in 6 Movements

"As Distinct from Humming" brings performer and listener to the boundary between speech and singing, foregrounding the physical mechanisms that make vocalization possible and highlighting the materiality of language in the most fundamental sense: phonemes, the building blocks of human language.  The difference between the poem on the page and the poem spoken aloud is expanded, as the performer's musical sense of timing is crucial to the piece.  The text is a found poem about the development of classical Western vocal technique, the positioning of the voice within orchestral genres, and the codification of performance (which subordinated the performer to the composer). These issues flow both through and in juxtaposition with the extended vocal technique and physical awareness demanded of the performer by this piece. Always, the body and its processes in phonating are placed in the forefront: breath, resonance, articulation and changes in the flow of sound are highlighted to compliment the meaning of the text itself.

Recording of live vocal performance and processed audio recorded at the Boise Experimental Music Festival (2007). 

This found poem was also performed with fixed media at Veritas Bookstore (Boise Idaho, 2007) and Contingency: Reading Between the Genres at the Mills College Museum, Oakland, California (2009).

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