Lyrics for Punk
text, performance
2:24 min.
2017

Performed by FUTURE RAGS (Caroline McCraw, Emily Martin, Nathanael Jones, Tricia Park).
The band, band name, and song lyrics are all of them jokes gone too far—some would say, much like punk rock.

Lyrics For Punk

ruin'd
audio
7:31 min.
2019

Using portions of the Pure Data patch used to make the laptop recordings in the TAP project, a nine second passage from Francis Seyrig's score for the film Last Year at Marienbad is reworked through granular synthesis and pseudo-random algorithms, mirroring the film's own distortion and reordering of narrative chronology.

ruin'd

Rap Painting 1
text, audio
12:07 min.
2020

Rap Painting 1 is a sound poem. Rap Painting 1 tickles the ear differently than it does the eye. When you grow up as an Afro-Caribbean Canadian surrounded by white anglophones in a particularly tense part of French Canada how can people expect you to have your grandmother's accent? They can't.

Rap Painting 1

Argumentative Music
audio, video, text
variable duration
2021

Argumentative Music draws on mundane, everyday sounds and instances of spoken language in order to explore the materiality of recorded sound and speech. It is concerned with exposing the malleability of language in its various forms—as speech, text, and digital code—and revels in the musical potential of controlled accidents. A portion of an ongoing series of multilingual sound poems, which are themselves reenactments of my own spontaneous outbursts, comprises the main text. This is complimented by the real-time manipulation of a short audio sample from my TAP project, which used a custom Pure Data patch to make random audio recordings through my laptop's internal microphone.

Full piece: https://youtu.be/Rp98yfNLrQk

Argumentative Music (excerpt)

after Delia Ann
audio
durations vary
2021

“After Delia Ann 01.121” is part of a series of works inspired by the musique concrète pioneer Delia Derbyshire, and uses a short sample from the TAP project to create melodic and harmonic textures.

after Delia Ann 01.121

Weighting for Peregrines
performance
4:05 min.
2021

A poetry reading for an elusive falcon I suspect lives in the Pilsen neighbourhood on Chicago's Lower West Side. The fugitive nature of phonemes that jump from language to language, word to word, is mirrored in the reclusiveness of the predatory bird.

Weighting for Peregrines

Tutelage
audio installation
22:50 min.
2021

This piece is inspired by my own experiences of acquiring a second language in the context of the enduring (and evolving) French colonial project in North America. Rather than attempt to explain the ways in which colonized peoples and places are marked through language, it instead looks to convey how physical and virtual landscapes are indelibly marred by colonial violence. These landscapes—geographies, cultural and societal spaces, individual psyches—are haunted by the memory of language weaponized toward imperialist ends, and endlessly reverberate the histories inscribed upon them.

Sound is not often conceived of as being an integral feature of physical landscapes but it is rarely absent from them. I believe that the inherent impermanence of physical landscapes can be foregrounded through deliberate sonic interventions, acts which could help to invert the hierarchy whereby we prioritize what we can see over what we can hear. This inversion draws attention to the varying speeds at which the different features comprising physical landscapes decay, and further highlights the immaterial, overlapping landscapes they share spaces with.
Trauma eludes exposition and cannot be explained, but its effects can be felt as emotional and psychological states. As a porous and flexible medium capable of both triggering memories and integrating seamlessly into physical and virtual spaces, sound is able to tease out the invisible and inexpressible burdens landscapes harbour.

https://carlybutler.com/umd-gallery/josrkr7gyfz9n7rpiugfd780ydrxo1

Tutelage (excerpt)

ménage/housework
text, audio
10:57 min.
2022

Two copies of a recording of a suite of multilingual sound poems performed by myself are played back at the same time and subjected to differing forms of algorithmic post-processing in Pure Data.

ménage/housework

Long List VII
text, audio, performance
20:57 min.
2022

Long Lists is a series of list poems composed of ideas for artworks, films, theatre pieces, albums, etc.—text scores essentially. The majority of these ideas are still unrealized, however a classmate once observed that by speaking them aloud the individual list entries achieved a level of finality, as though they found the catharsis of physical realization through the back door of the speech act (thank you Fulla).
Here a list poem is paired with several dozen audio recordings made through the smartphone microphone of a collaborator (Joseph Demes), who had been instructed to go on a walk in Manhattan while they added commentary on their surroundings and the associations these geographies gave rise to. The resulting recordings are being triggered throughout the piece and subjected to digital signal processing techniques according to a pseudo-random algorithm.
Collectively the two audio sources attempt to reanimate an imaginary, composite landscape which owes its life rhythms, population, and idiosyncrasies to the subjectivities of its authors.

full piece:
https://vimeo.com/718446837

Long List VII (excerpt)

Études for Synthesizer
text, audio, performance
variable dimensions
2022

Études For Synthesizer (excerpt)

Nathanael Jones is a Canadian writer and artist born in Montreal.

Nathanael Jones

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