fleeting [prequel] (omari jazz sc7)

A string quartet in 3 movements, written for the Irish Composition Summer School 2024 and workshopped by the Ficino Ensemble

3 Photos Of A Waxwork Bird

saturday

made with granulated bird sounds plus some other stuff using max msp

bird machine

performed by Rishi Mirchandani

commissioned by Ilayda Deniz Oguz

O great pachinko machine in the sky, what wonders do you have for me today? for piano & fixed electronics (2025)

An electroacoustic etude exploring the concept of rhythm, made exclusively with Garageband Drum Machine Presets. Inspired heavily by the work of the New Complexity movement, especially the Percussion Solo Bone Alphabet by Brian Ferneyhough, Garageband Beat #54 is a multi-year dissection on beat-making. Composed initially as an inside joke during the composer's full-time summer job, this piece blurs the line between intentionality and a sincere lack of musical abilities. This work is also part of a series of sonic works that deal with sonic oversaturation and busy, complicated structures to externalize the composer's mind. Garageband Beat #54 raises the question: When do non-rhythms become polyrhythms? And when do those become heavily synchronized auditory gestures on a giant time scale that we call sonic phenomena? Are intensely choreographed polyrhythms just really a dubious excuse for the lack of time? How can we solve and work through complicated music in a way that makes sense? How do we process sound and rhythms that are seemingly fragmented, complicated, completely random, and sonically unreliable?

Garageband Beat #54

Piano 1: Ethan Resnik
Piano 2: Megaria Halim
Vibraphone: Alex Holloway
Marimba: Hannah Lam
Conductor: Thomas Rosenkranz

As The Sky Breathes(2025) for two pianos, vibraphone, and marimba

Ed Atkins reads an excerpt from his latest book, OLD FOOD.

From one of the most lauded artists of his generation comes a purging soliloquy: a profound nowt delivered in some spent afterwards. Scorched by senility and nostalgia, and wracked by all kinds of hunger, Ed Atkins’ OLD FOOD lurches from allegory to listicle, from lyric to menu, fetching up a plummeting, idiomatic and crabbed tableau from the cannibalised remains of each form in turn. Written in conjunction with Atkins’ exhibition of the same name, OLD FOOD is a hard Brexit, wadded with historicity, melancholy and a bravura kind of stupidity.
     Ed Atkins is an artist who makes all kinds of convolutions of self-portraiture. He writes uncomfortably intimate, debunked prophesies; paints travesties; and makes realistic computer generated videos that often feature figures that resemble the artist in the throes of unaccountable psychical crises. Atkins’ artificial realism, whether written or animated, pastiches romanticism to get rendered down to a sentimental blubber – all the better to model those bleak feelings often so inexpressible in real life.

O great pachinko machine in the sky, what wonders do you have for me today? for piano & fixed electronics (2025)

Thomas Shorthouse

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