Long time collaborator and friend, Travis Farwell, and I are starting a new project, MonstruM. Here's a demo of the stuff we're working on. We will have a set put together soon and are looking to play quiet venues. Enjoy!

A new work by visual artist's Samuel Partal and Carrie Schreck featuring my piece nebula-nova (2012). This triptych was displayed on three monitors, each monitor offset by varying amounts to produce loops of new visual and auditory material. Heliographae was shown at the Ars Lumina show at Sancho Gallery in January 2012. 

This Valentine's day I will be doing a repeat performance of Til I Get It Right which premiered at RandR Gallery October 28th, 2011 (see previous post). This performance will be very different, however! In addition to having our lovely visuals composed by Carrie Schreck and Samuel Partal, I am very proud to announce that my guest musicians will be the band Derde Verde, a honey-drenched trio hailing from CalArts who have recently invaded the Los Angeles music scene with full force. You can listen to their EP Moon/Mirror at their bandcamp (and I highly suggest you do so!).

Sliding Down was a success! I was so happy and thankful to have so many friends come out and support my project. Everyone who performed that night did such an exceptional job in terms of concept, aesthetic and skill. 

Some photos from the Murder Ballads at the Echoplex on October 20th, 2011. All photos taken by Dream in Art Photography. I'll post reviews and more photos as they come available. Enjoy!

     

     

I'm performing at the Echoplex October 20th with this rad line-up of musician's for the Los Angeles Folk Festival's Return of the Murder Ballads. You can check out videos and songs at the LA Folk Fest's website and their bandcamp. I'll be installed in some corner of the venue making weird soundscapes about murder for the sake of love, dressed up like a zombie cowgirl doll. ('Tis the season!)

The folk fest was kind enough to feature a work on mine, here's a direct link to my song, Take My Heart. This same song will be a part of my solo show, Til I Get It Right, premiering at the RandR Gallery on the 28th of October for the show Sliding Down. I'm also performing with skellie-noise duo Lola Loshkey this Saturday. We will be summoning the souls of our dead pets along with Emily Lacy, Ezra Buchla and Andrew Felix. Busy month!

Practicing my concert reviews.

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Well, it took four to light a very bright light in the Disney Hall last night for the first event in the Green Umbrella series for the 2011/12 season. The evening began with a piece by Zostra Di Castra, an emerging composer still working toward her Ph. D in New York. Her work was based on the Italian writer Italo Calvino's short story La forma dello spazio (The Form of Space) from his famed collection Cosmicomics, where palindromic narrator Qfwfq dreams of changing the shape of space to touch the woman he loves. Di Castra used this concept by placing the flute and clarinet behind the orchestra seating while the violinist, cellist and pianist were up on stage, causing dutch conductor, Otto Tausk, to make sweeping gestures to get all five to play together. This placement of instruments allowed the waveforms to fly at each other from either direction, the harmonies colliding over the audience like fireworks. Morton Feldman came next on the program, Feldman was a colleague of famous 20th century composer John Cage and credits Cage with giving him the courage to compose, leaving a mark on his compositional approach and style. As a young violist I remember running into this work at a sheet music shop and always wanted the opportunity to perform it. Saying that–it's not really a showy viola work–in fact the viola acts as much as a solo instrument as the rest of the chamber performers. However, it does resemble the character of the viola, being a dozy sort of piece where you're invited to feel melancholy next to a dimming fireplace. After a short intermission, the ensembles became larger, beginning with a piece by prolific Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu. In his piece Rain Coming, Takemitsu was eager to use conventional harmony as ornamentation, which stood out from the other pieces that evening, whose composers avoided common tonality like they were too cool to fall for a bad trend. Rain Coming is part of Takemitsu's Waterscape series exploring his concept the "sea of tonality"–the idea that a work is a harmonic flow–the Tao of sound; he marks this thought with a recurring motive, Eb-E-A (or as written in German Es-E-A, spelling S-E-A). Austrian composer Georg Friedirch Haas closed and perhaps stole the show that evening with a work for a 'battling' chamber orchestra. The strings were facing the brass, woodwinds and double bass and acted as separate entities, taking turns to perform or, when playing together, causing an explosion of semi-tonal polyphony. All of the instruments had their own parts, including each of the 16 string players–and when the strings played it was like Ligeti had been brought back from the dead and the audience was transported to Jupiter on a rainbow. Haas really knows how to work with microtonal harmony.

Judging from this exquisite opening evening, the Green Umbrella program has a great season in store for us this year, including works by Cage, Stockhausen, Reich (also coming to perform!), Andriessen and resident composer John Adams.

Hello everyone and anyone! I'm scoring my first feature film for The Most Fun I've Ever Had With My Pants On. We're looking for backers for our kickstarter page, so even if you have $1 to share it would be a great help for us.

Here's a little bit about the film:

THE MOVIE

Drew Denny wrote her first feature film at her father's bedside as he was losing his battle to cancer. Determined to honor his memory through art, Drew gathered her best friends from USC film school and hit the road to make the movie. Drew co-directs with Sundance-featured director Clay Jeter of JESS + MOSS (http://www.jessandmoss.com), collaborating to create an evocative road film that blends dark comedy, romance and autobiography.

“The Most Fun I’ve Ever Had With My Pants On” tells the story of two childhood girlfriends who drive from Los Angeles to Austin, TX. Drew Denny plays Andy, who fulfills her father's will after his sudden death by scattering his ashes across the Southwest. Sarah Hagan (Freaks and Geeks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 90210) plays Liv, a blossoming young actress riding along to Austin to audition for the role of a vixen spy in a noir film to be cast and shot in Texas.

Between LA and Austin, the girls scramble across the Mojave desert, skinny dip in Sedona AZ, make sand angels in White Sands NM, climb oil rigs in West Texas, and raise hell in Austin. The girls perform mini funerals within these epic landscapes, pretending to be spies as they attempt to escape the heat of the hottest August in recorded history...

October 28th I will be playing my first solo show at R&R Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles with singer/songwriter Vonelle, Eric Byers of the Calder Quartet and *SADIE (Seth Weiner). I'll be joined by musicians Andy Ben on circuit bent toys and Masatoshi Sato on double bass, visual artists Carrie Schrek and Samuel Partal and costumes will be designed by Darija Varnas. I'll be posting more information about the show on my blog as it becomes available, but for now you can read a little bit about my concept.

In preparation for working on a film with my long time collaborator Drew Denny I'm compiling more film score research and a list of movies to watch.

Even though my background has been in classical instruments, I have to say I've grown to love electronic music. I've even moved away from classical notation in favor of writing in MIDI format. With this being said, I've been doing a lot of research into composers who are heavy on electronic instrumentation but also use traditional instruments to increase the sound palette. Two of my favorite composers right now are Vangelis (Blade Runner, Chariots of Fire), Mark Mothersbaugh (Life Aquatic, Royal Tenenbaums), John Brion (Punch Drunk Love, I <3 Huckabees) and Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet). There's certainly a mixture here when it comes to the plot of the films themselves, showing the versatility of electronic music.

Vangelis' score for Blade Runner closely resembles my composing style, eerie long tones floating in and out creating extreme amounts of unresolved tension. In addition to the original music, the sound design is noticeably score-like in itself. Continuing on with Vangelis' music, he literally made Chariots of Fire a good movie. Not only is the theme one of the most iconic melodies in film music, but uses music to make strange parts even stranger. During the races the film is slowed down and the music is tense and stretched out, magnifying the pain and anxiety endured in those short moments of extreme physical exertion.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has amazing surreal passages composed by none other than LA's Jon Brion, but I have to say the part of the score that stuck with me the most were the flirtacious woodwind conversations that come up during Kate Winslett and Jim Carrey first meeting. Punch Drunk Love is really a huge influence for me considering Brion wrote most of the music during filming and helped out in production, sort of like what I'm doing for Girls Go Wild!

One of my favorite film composers of all time is Angelo Badalamenti, especially his work with David Lynch. For Twin Peaks he manages to make the most beautiful, well-composed music as cheesy as the denim suits and lime green font that make the series as much of a soap opera as a masterpiece of television. His shit can also become absolutely terrifying.