Timestretched to the length of the longest recording. Now available for download / vinyl: https://heyexit.bandcamp.com/album/every-recording-of-gymnopedie-1

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Every Recording of Gymnopedie 1

for solo violin, pre-recorded spoken voice, and live electronics

Premiere: 8 June 2018; Gallery 1412, Seattle, WA

Luke Fitzpatrick, violin
Ibidunni Ojikutu, spoken voice 

DARN. exhibits a counterpoint of evolving structures. Perhaps the most prominent of these structures is the spoken part that contains a number of reactions to Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music achievement, collected from various online sources. The reactions are integrated into the piece in a particular order, ranging from seemingly naïve questions about what qualifies Lamar’s album DAMN. for the award, to bursts of blatant racism.

The piece is also a study on Roland TR-808, a classic drum machine that has shaped the soundscapes of numerous hip-hop beats. The electronic layer of the piece heavily relies on a digital emulation of the bass drum circuit of TR-808.

DARN.

Studio Recording of 'Transients and Latent Spaces' for beatboxer.

Programme Note:

'Transients and Latent Spaces' is my first work exploring the applications of deep learning and generative AI to concert music composition. Two deep models from Google's Magenta project were used as part of the compositional process: drums_rnn and MusicVAE.

I trained the drums_rnn model on drum patterns based on rhythms from The Sacrificial Dance, the final movement of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring which brings to the forefront many of the rhythmic devices employed by Stravinsky throughout the rest of his piece. These drums patterns were obtained by manually adding an accompanying drum part to sections of this movement, trying to match the rhythmic accenting of the original work as accurately as possible. This model was used to generate various sections of material which functioned as structural 'pillars' of the piece.

The MusicVAE model, trained on a massive corpus of drum beats from popular music, was used to interpolate between these 'pillars' of Stravinsky-influenced material generated by drums_rnn, in a way that was smooth-sounding yet also used natural and idiomatic beat patterns.

Recorded and performed by myself, July-August 2018

'Transients and Latent Spaces' (2018) - Solo Beatboxer

Performed in EARTH#SKY#SPACE festival in 22/06/18, Hannover.
Conducted by Andreas Felber. Vocalensemble der HMTMH.

Fall, leaves, fall
by Emily Bronte

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

Fall Leaves Fall, for SSAA solo voices (2018)

Farewell, my sweet 9th floor...

"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." - Jean-Luc Goddard

New track from the album I am currently working on, enjoy!

Feast // Famine

Recorded December 2004 for Solo CD "Blaauw"

Isabel Mundry, Solo Auf Schwellen for double bell trumpet

Gleitend -Jieun Noh - LIVE recording (2017)

Claroscuro (2019) 

Performed by JACK Quartet

Recording and Mix by Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie

Claroscuro (String Quartet)

Laura Barger and Alexandra LaMastra, piano
Anthony DeMartinis and Russell Greenberg, percussion
Reilly Spitzfaden, no-input mixer

Premiered at the Yarn/Wire Institute in the Staller Center Recital Hall at Stony Brook University on July 1, 2019

Notes on the instruments:

Percussion 1 plays a speaker hooked directly to a 9v battery. Touching a pair of contacts to various irregular pieces of metal or parts of the piano completes the circuit and makes crackling noises. 

Percussion 2 plays a megaphone by scraping various materials on the microphone and making feedback. 

The no-input mixer feeds back the outputs of a mixer to the inputs. Turning on various combinations of channels and adjusting the gain, EQ, pan, etc shapes the feedback.

'Transients and Latent Spaces' (2018) - Solo Beatboxer

Omar Peracha

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