Selected Performances
Sound House
In this sound film, Sound House: everyone is working, tasks such as checking guidance systems and repairing security systems are replaced by sonic tasks: brick laying, improvised live-feed video, manipulating two Bunraku-like puppets, and arranging eight modular sound walls. The puppets and performers fill their time memorizing instructions, practicing launch procedures, playing games, reading, and napping, which creates an effect of tending and focused activity. Meaning emerges through accumulation, concurrence, and patient observation.
Bridge to the Four Islands
Composed by William T. Roper
performed by Cassia Streb, viola
recorded at Human Resources, Los Angeles; February 2021
produced by Middle Ear Project
Unspooling
Collaborative installation/performance with Tim Feeney, for Automata, Los Angeles, January 22, 2023.
Eight-channel sound installation, for wooden crates prepared with transducers and filled with debris: shattered bits of flowerpot, lava rocks, nails, old keys, pebbles, and bottle caps.
These cycle through field recordings building an apocryphal memory palace:
Lithobolia, a hail of stones and nails; Los Angeles, December 2022
Crickets, tractor-trailer; Route 79 and Brooktondale Road, Slaterville NY, July 2014
Tides, caves; Lake Michigan, Jacksonport WI, December 2018
Metal sheet, snowfall; Ithaca NY, December 2007
High-tension wires, air traffic, crows; Whitney Canyon, Newhall CA, August 2020
Firecrackers, Gillie Mor/Whistle O’er the Lave Out; Lunar New Year, Chung King Court, Los Angeles, January 2023
Live performance within this soundscape, for stiff brush, viola, superball, rough stick, files, ceramic rattles, broken flowerpots, bottle caps, small bells, 10d nails, old keys, and river stones.
The Gamble House; Inside Out
In this video, the Gamble House is home to string quartets composed by three American mavericks in their own rights—Johanna Beyer, Charles Ives, and Pamela Z. Through the music’s sound and the Gamble House's space, the film reflects on two deeply formative and contested American ideals: innovation and home.
Waiting-Room
Collaborative installation/performance with Tim Feeney, for Brightwork and Tuesdays at Monkspace, Los Angeles, April 25, 2023.
Twelve sounding objects assembled from bluetooth speakers, cigar boxes, LEDs, and vellum, mounted to a wall of an empty warehouse room, and cycling through a recorded hail of rattled pebbles, nails, and keys, and longer tones from bowed metal and strings.
Live performance in the adjacent warehouse space, for stiff brush, viola, superball, rough stick, files, ceramic rattles, broken flowerpots, bottle caps, small bells, 10d nails, old keys, and river stones.
Music of what happens
Composed by Tim Feeney; for Jessika Kenney, Laura Steenberge, Cassia Streb, Mustafa Walker, and Cody Putman.
Premiered at REDCAT, Disney Hall, Los Angeles, on February 28, 2020. Tamzin Elliott writes on the performance for SFCV.
Music of what happens became a folio of text pieces from Tim Feeney’s travels, and is an attempt to connect the agency so important to our improvising ethic to our memories and to older musics, collaging abstract sounds with fragments of folk music including some sean nós songs of western Ireland. It seems to allow for an explicitly nostalgic source to be renewed and repatterned, in a way that feels viscerally important at a time when nostalgia seems to be a hiding place from an otherwise increasingly fragmented and fearful present.
Recording released via Suppedaneum, February 2022, in a folio including the recorded performance, a recorded reading of the score, a superimposition of this reading onto the performance audio, text performance notes, and small bits of musical notation concerning the folk material.
Wind People
Composed by Ben Richter
Performed by the Ghost Ensemble
Roy and Edna CalArts Theater, Los Angeles, CA
February 2020
What else seems as free as the wind? As powerful, as gentle? As transient, as eternal? If we listen to the wind, as to the unheard corners of the world, and beyond it — oceans, volcanoes, plate tectonics, planetary magnetic fields — the sound-world that emerges shows the cosmic beauty of flux: every phenomenon, from the movement of the wind to that of continents, is constantly changing, flowing, blending together, whether visible or invisible to our current perception of time.
Through Wind People I hope to draw a sense of peace and comfort from our smallness, transience, and fragility in the face of an overwhelming immensity, the music mirroring the constant ebb and flow visible when zooming in or out to quantum or geological time. — B.R.
VSTO for String Quartet
Composed by Alvin Curran in 2009 for string quartet
Performed by the Koan Quartet in 2016 in Los Angeles, CA
Written for choreographer Trisha Brown, Curran writes: "As students, Elliott Carter said we could do anything but write octaves; here the octave rules like Gurdjieff. It is an interval that goes absolutely nowhere even when it goes up and down..."
Other Forests
Composed by Carolyn Chen
Performed by the Koan String Quartet in 2016
The Neighborhood Church of Pasadena, CA
This piece was commissioned by the Southland Ensemble as a piece to act as a prelude to a realisation of David Tudor’s 1968 work, Rainforest.