Anechoia Memoriam
This is an interactive work created in collaboration with Jonathan Henderson for Selectric Piano and free range audience. The score is composed from a list of 180 people of color killed by law enforcement in the US. The score scrolls by the typewriter and onto the floor for seven hours. If nobody sits down to type, the piece is silent. When a participant types from the score the letters are played as notes on the piano. This video is from the first performance of the piece at Black Mountain College’s ReViewing 12 conference.
“Homage to Civ” (detail)
“Homage to Civ” is activated by riding a bike to pump water into an elevated reservoir. The water drips down to a collection of pitched percussion elements. The sounds are unstructured in a conventional musical sense, nevertheless, melody, rhythmic feel and evolving patterns are discoverable for an attentive listener.
“Conversation (for John O’Donohue)” (detail)
In this piece two participants play ping pong against the glass while a third listens. This piece popped into my mind when I heard John O’Donohue ask in an interview, “When is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture?”
“Plenty of Free Time” (detail)
This is an attention experiment in the form of three music boxes. Each plays its famous melody very slowly. Extra time between notes is the only difference, but something about the way attention works makes it impossible to bridge that time and identify the tunes. I am interested in what can be heard when listening is directed but unsupervised by recognition.
“Where Music Comes From” (detail)
I glued a speaker to a little cooling fan. Audiences can pipe their own music or recordings to the contraption as it flies around the gallery on the end of a string.