This page is where I go so far as to "talk about" my "work". There are very few forums for this. Even in a large vibrant creative community such as New York City, where i live. Usually this species of thought and talk is relegated to between close firends, professional yelling matches, pillow talk, academic programs, or liquored up end-of-the-long-night tirades. But what is more intimate than the most public forum of the modern age, the website? Talking intimately and personallay on the web is like taking your pants off in a public park: no-one has to look at you, but if they do, they are rewarded with a mild diversion.....
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SOUND:
My work concerns the modern anxiety environment, technological development, physicality/liveness, and our inner-world. By situating sound samples on the common and obsolete cassette tape I can physically manipulate my everyday sonic environment. The cassette tape provides a physical body for each sample, a body whose mailability is based on physical manipulation rather than the infinite choice of the digital realm. The collage that can be worked up from such a sample source is intimately tied to my physical state (manipulation at the moment of mixing), and my course through time (my choice of samples are drawn from my route through life, the shifting sonic environments i am exposed to). The simple sound technology of a "Looper" allows for a moment to be caught, broken, refracted, and repeated; a rhythm of repeated moments. A moment made of a richness of moments. This I believe aesthetically replicates (or pays homage to) the pulse of the inner world where our unknowable secret dimensions shift and realign, and what the new world awash in constant juxtaposing layers of rich information sounds like from moment to moment.
modern life is a heavily mediated reality.
A picture of our modern lives can be painted by describing our constant
reaction to our attempts to create "new culture" and "new
forms of expression" with our technology and our relationship
to it.
Dealing with the human races rapid technological development is the
social currency of our time. Its a measure of "how we are doing".
The feeling of wether or not one is "up to date with the world" is
a real new anxiety. Never before has the world required this of us on
a daily basis. The global consciousness of the technologically connected
world requires new ways of thinking and social behavior at the level
of the individual. This creates anxiety and stress.
The kind of stress, like the shear amount of progress, is new as well.
Information stress.
In the past, where a one new idea could destroy or create a whole way
of life, now we are forced to receive, process and utilize hundreds of
ideas daily.
the modern mindset is a type of controlled insanity.
like running up a greasy incline, pausing for a second will cause you to slide downward. "you'll never catch me twittering" "i think the Wii is stupid"
this complexity and the ways it succeeds and fails is
the beauty of the modern world. The Bounty of the modern
condition. Our brains were designed in prehistory to help us survive
the savage earth and now we regularly use it to process information that
can be nothing but noise: News from around the world, blasts of machine
noise, constant hum of computers, spam disguised as friendly email, lush
high definition video reproductions, advertisements covering every surface,
etc.
This is the price of our progress. we have good days and bad days.
My work is concerned with an aesthetic reaction to the
modern world, choked with information and technology, and a personal
attempt to find the sublime in the haze of modern life without rejecting
the bounty of human progress. The world asks us to look upon ourselves
in the full glory of interconnected global consciousness and go mad,
and I want to accept the new world and maintain the poetry and primordial
truths of the ancient human while developing along with the planet, the
new organism that it is.
the modern world asks us to go mad.
My work is concerned with the overwhelming sonic character of the modern
world. In our information choked times the intersections of sounds that
were created for a specific purpose are experienced as a din, fog of
noise.
I want to play upon these intersections and extract their latent beauty,
a kind of beauty that could only exist or be expressed now, here, at
our race's particular level of technological advancement.
"Music" and "sound/art" can do anything we want.
Contemporary sample technology can create any flavor of collage we want,
from perfectly spliced together pop-mash-ups to mathematically remixed
interactive soundscapes made from a single tone. Processing software
and hardware can produce any sonic environment that has ever existed;
one can dial-in the sound of a James Brown album, simulate the sonic
character of a cave, or change the sound of any instrument into any other
instrument.
Since we can get anything we want, should we? Technological advancement
has multiplied our aesthetic choices infinitely, mirroring the kind of
insanity the world asks of us socially. Do more choices help up create
better art? does utilizing new technology automatically make our work
relevant and contemporary?
Is the sound of us learning how to use a fundamentally new instrument
our expression, or is it the instruments newness? These days, we have
entirely new types of new.
because we can do anything, sound like anything at any skill level, the
choices we make situate us in a "sonic world-view" a more general
term than musical genre or musical style. The global interconnected world
is blurring all categorical boundaries and making it more difficult to
situate oneself vis-a-vis a single human expression. whole genres are
born and die on the internet, klezmer creeps into salsa, old traditions
meld with new tambers and fashions swing from electronic to traditional
and every hybrid in between.
I want my ego to relinquish its supposed control over the world of the moment, and i want my work to be evident in the bare fact of the moments passing physically through me. Like a prism breaking the light.
