Treuting: amid the noise - go

Performed by Shaun Cayabyab on Vibraphone at SPLICE institute, this piece is Nathan's first excursion into writing for instruments and electronics.  

Resplendent Shards- For Vibraphone and Electronics

Lemon Drops
written as part of the So Percussion Summer Intensive 2015
performed by Caitlin Cawley, Shaun Cayabyab and Melody Loveless
recorded live somewhere outside in Princeton, NJ
featuring innocent bystanders eating ice cream in the summer heat

Lemon Drops

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

Commissioned and premiered by the Miami University Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Dr. Ricardo Averbach.
(Note - stylistically this piece is a complete anomaly for me. Check out some of my other stuff on soundcloud and you'll see what I mean...)

Arcade Variations is a true Frankenstein’s Monster. Nearly every element heard throughout its duration was extracted from the carcass of an existing video game theme. The selected themes date from the beginning of the short history of games through the present. Their appearance in the piece, however, is organized in the shape of a wedge: the first themes to appear (after a brief introduction) come from the middle of this history, from 1998—2001. Subsequent sections combine material from earlier and later games, working backwards to the beginning, around the late 70s, and forwards to the year I began composing the piece: 2016.

The fun was in their combination. No section relies exclusively on the music from any single game – instead they are combined, often in counterpoint, and altered to fit within a given section. Some of the themes are easily recognizable, others are fragmented, transposed, or buried within a predominant texture. The entire list, in order of appearance, is included below. Find them if you can!

**Theme Name – Game Name (year)**:
Entity - from Ico (2001)
Kotake and Koume - from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)
Scars of Time - from Chrono Cross (1999)
Halo - from Halo: Combat Evolved (2002)
Separation With Despair - from Shadow Of The Colossus (2005)
Air Man - from Mega Man 2 (1989)
A-Type - from Tetris (1985)
Title Screen Theme - Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (1994)
Prayer - from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)
Theme of Tara - from Metal Gear (1987)
Prelude - from Final Fantasy XIV (2009)
Journey to Skyhold - from Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)
Berzerk (1980)
Donkey Kong (1981)
Space Invaders (1978)
Rally X (1980)
Pac Man (1980)

This piece is dedicated to the Miami University Symphony Orchestra, on the occasion of its Centennial celebration.

Arcade Variations (with annotations)

Crystalline is a piece meant to exploit the metallic, resonant nature of crotales. This is my first in-depth use of Max/MSP in a piece.

Performed by Shaun Cayabyab
Von der Mehden Recital Hall, University of Connecticut, April 1, 2017.

Crystalline - for Crotales and Live Electronics

For percussion and electronics
Performed by Ryan Packard
(Note: this is an earlier recording than the one included on the Tzadik release.)

The electronics for Solis-EA are organized around a physical model of an 8 stringed instrument capable of producing a huge amount of distortion and internal feedback. This instrument responds to the material played by the percussionist, attempting to track the pitch of these sometimes “unpitched” instruments as best it can. 

The piece is loosely inspired by the novel Stillaset Brandt, by the Norwegian author Pedr Solis. Having created several other pieces that are tightly connected with the principle (unnamed) character in the novel, Solis-EA is more concerned with the author himself, his unusual and dichotomous life, and his mysterious disappearance (or tragic end, depending on which biographer you read).  

This piece is dedicated to Ryan Packard


Solis-EA

Sound Designer, Composer, Software Engineer, and other certain titles.