8-channel surround piece (stereo reduction)

Cisterna II was composed from recordings I made in the small town of Guanacaste, located high in the mountains of southern Honduras. When I visited in 2013, I was amazed by a giant cistern that sits on the mountain just outside of the village. Despite this, the residents of Guanacaste had infrequent access to clean water because the pipes had deteriorated and the town is very remote and difficult to access. Fortunately, a volunteer project rebuilt the pipe system and reconnected the community to the cistern in the years following my visit.

Many of the sounds in this piece – including interviews with residents about their relationship to water, local livestock, and the constant bachata music on the local radio – are convolved with the sound of the cistern's interior, its resonance captured by dropping a microphone in the open pipe that was eventually reconnected to the village.

A live performance version of this piece was premiered in Paris in 2014 as part of the IRCAM Manifeste festival, and recomposed for premiere at the DIFFUSION festival in Baltimore in 2021.

Cisterna II

the shape of it

technical test turned into composition. first result of getting sounds out of the 1980 CBM 8032 computer. massive cloud of Lexicon 480L reverb in 2nd part and a low sine wave generator. The rest is pure 8 bit.

http://www.roberthenke.com/installations/8032series.html


8032 Alpha

"…ce dangereux supplément…" is a set of phonetic studies for voice, video, and electronics. A suite of three pieces [(tRas), (spɛktʁ), and (sɑ̃dʁ)] the work is based on a close examination of the sounds used in everyday linguistic activity, which are juxtaposed against more extreme vocal effects. The live performance is supplemented with electronic voices which stretch and transform this common vocality. The visuals range from rapid-fire successions of symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet, to more suspended meditations on elaborately arranged orthographic tapestries made from the same symbols.

"…ce dangereux supplément…" is a poetic rehearsal of the Derridean supplement, that unbelonging excess in a binary opposition which is (contradictorily) crucially indispensable. This takes place throughout the work via a dialectic between linguistic articulation (consonants) and voiced intonation (vowels). While moving between these two poles, the performer acts out a futile search for the primary referent (or "master signifier"), but eventually realizes all that is to be found is an infinite hauntology, a spectral chain of traces, specters, and cinders.

Recording with visuals:  https://vimeo.com/156198149

“…ce dangereux supplément…”

Performed by Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie and Jon Singer , December 15, 2015. Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016. 7:30pm.

Info: http://jsmishalanie.com/music/piece-for-eight-microcassette-recorders/


PIece For Eight Microcassette Recorders

Medical text pp. 57: Age is an aggressive, virtuosic, and remarkably vulnerable piece crafted around the text found in the educational tome Cyclopædia of Practical Medicine Vol. 1 published in 1845. 
The chapter that this piece addresses is on the topic of age and its effects on the body through the multiple stages of life, beginning with nascent burgeoning growth and advancing to eventual unerring onset of decay. This piece manipulates the coherence of text and plays off of humanities want to comprehend speech in voices, often crafting phones and consonants that are similar to speech but contorting them beyond understanding. When juxtaposed with recognizable text and married with a plethora of timbral driven gestures and extended vocal techniques, smooth transitions between nonsense and meaningful text help to drive the piece through continuums of obfuscation and clarity.

Medical Text p.57 - for voice and live electronics

composed by Jason Charney

Amish community worship includes singing from the Ausbund, a 16th c. collection of hymns. The book contains no musical notation, only texts from the old Swiss Anabaptists. The tunes are passed orally in true folk tradition, generation to generation.

In practice, each hymn begins with a call from the Vorsänger, and the entire congregation responds - singing loud and slow.

Ausbund

Please Charge Roomba

Written for Sam Wells for the first annual SPLICE Institute at Western Michigan University.

Grain Elevator - For Trumpet and Electronics - Performed by Sam Wells

Arr. by Wesleyan University's Toneburst Laptop & Electronic Arts Ensemble, feat. Jennifer Beattie & Matthew Evan Taylor